The Ink

Into the new YEAR

2012-01-18T10:31:00.001-07:00

pitched (1), originally uploaded by iamkr.

2012

Already into the New Year and hitting the ground running. Though, not running as much as I would like, but that is more about giving my legs a break for a few months in the winter so I can enjoy the rest of the year.

Already, I have been in Austin for a stretch, which included a photo session with Sarah Holt Photography & Design. Sarah is an old friend from my days as a mountaineering guide. When Kit and I were considering engagement photos we decided to forgo the typical Colorado scenes and hire Sarah to do a shoot for us around Austin Texas. The results are amazing, some of which can be seen HERE.

Not in Boulder 36 hours from Austin, Kit and I headed to Black Mountain Ranch for the weekend. It was a bit of a work trip for her and Andrew Hyde, with me tagging along to snap photos of the property for future marketing campaigns. You can see some of the results of that shoot at Kendallruth.com, and on the BMR blog.

Also, I have taken on another Year in Photography project. In 2009 I carried out a variation of a 365 Project . The daily need to shoot at least one picture, if not more, changed how I saw the world around me, and my own life. Knowing there is much adventure ahead this year, I decided to make another go at it this year. I can already see how different and more precise I am in the photos I take this time around than a couple of years ago. Then, I felt like I was learning to swim in a large ocean of imagery and technique. Now I can ride the waves, seeing the best coming into the line-up, with a joyful confidence. If you’ve ever wanted to experiment with photography, taking on a photo-a-day project or a simpler once-a-week shot will push you into all the good ways of learning that is yours to receive… just pick up a camera, and get out into the great wide world.

To use a running metaphor, of course, it might feel like you aren’t much of a runner at first, but getting out on the trails or roads every other day will quickly change that perspective. Give it enough time and with a visible goal, a couch potato can run a marathon within a year!

What will you do this year that you are afraid to try? Get on with it then!

Of Frogs and Gifting among the Liminal

2011-12-21T14:01:00.001-07:00

150px-Michigan_J_Frog, originally uploaded by Victoria Sobocki.

As a kid, many of my Saturday mornings involved eating pancakes in my pajamas while watching the two-hour long Bugs Bunny and Tweety show. This was before cartoons fell under the hyper-conscious censorship of some foolishly over-educated social or behavioral scientists. One short that has become iconic among Bugs cartoons is, “One Froggy Night.”

Michigan J. Frog is discovered by a construction worker demolishing a 50+ year-old building. The frog pops out of his box and starts singing. The worker imagines making tons of money off such a discovery and goes about various methods of getting the frog to sing on stage. The only trick is, Michigan doesn’t sing for the crowds. He only sings at the most inopportune times for this lone entrepreneurial-minded construction worker. The worker loses everything and ends up putting the frog back in a box, in another cornerstone… only to be rediscovered 100 year later by another worker.

In a seemingly random act of sub-consciousness, I had a dream that carried elements of this frog-based story. The frog still sang – which in and of itself is an extraordinary act – but he sang before a small audience of 8 or so, on a stairway landing between to floors. A great performance. You really should have been there.

How often do childhood cartoon experiences seep into adult subconscious messages? As I consider the context of said dream, I imagine that for my life the singing frog was representative of Gifting. We all have something that may not make sense but is extraordinary in its fullness, written into us. For my part, it takes a lifetime to learn not only what the gifts are but where they have their best place to shine. I am still learning. In the dream, the singing frog seems to be some gift that’s been around since childhood. Not only so, but it thrives, awakens and sings or rises to the occasion in Liminal space – a threshold between two planes – or in this context a landing on a stairway between two floors… and strangely looks like a cartoon frog named Michigan.

This got me thinking back to the original cartoon. Whether or not Chuck Jones had it in mind, I know not, but what if it is a warning against the exploitation of our gifting? A seemingly vague man discovers something extraordinary while in the midst of mundane work. The “something” is not meant for massive audiences and simply as a means of increasing financial wealth. In fact, it initially is meant for his delight alone. Maybe a few others, as time goes by, but not until the man learns to enjoy it first. But if it is taken too far too fast, the gift will only frustrate, disappoint and possibly bankrupt the individual.

This might be too much to ask of a children’s cartoon, but are not children’s stories often sculpted out of the mythical? Aesop’s fables, Harry Potter, Tolkien’s “Lord Of the Rings” – they all carry the eternal myths that resonate with the deepest Story we forgot along the way. And for my part, it might be that for me to “hear” where my part is in the Story, it had to come through a cartoon frog in the middle of the night amidst sleep and liminal space.

It would seem that kids watching cartoons is not such a bad thing after all. He or she might just discover a reflection of their gifting, to be reveled decades later like some secret time capsule or like a frog in a cornerstone amidst the reconstructions of a life.

Peregrinus

2011-12-18T11:05:00.000-07:00

Longtime friend and cohort Todd Clary does thing over at his blog, Waltzing in Perdition, where he interviews someone with what seems to be a random list of questions that in actually all tie together. I was his latest target, um, interview. You can here it here: Peregrinus

Caught and Taught at Curator Magazine

2011-11-13T10:02:00.001-07:00

Faded Glory, originally uploaded by iamkr.

We live digitally but often can make claims that the digital realm is the bane of true artistic existence. The flood of information and images and videos on a given day can make any head spin. There is something to be said for standing in the presence of the original, something that can be seen live that isn’t seen otherwise. It is, after all, the same reason most of us value human contact in real space instead of phone calls, text messages, and all the other disconnected connections available. Certainly, another human is an art to behold, live in space and time...Read the rest at Curator Magazine

Seven Billion Stories, and One

2011-10-26T09:37:00.001-06:00

Dirty World on a Thread, originally uploaded by iamkr.

A few days back I was waking up with the sun, sipping coffee and, somehow in that half awake state, the thought came into my head that there must be nearly seven billion people on the planet by now. A few days later the New York Times posted an article about a United Nations estimate says the planet would reach that number by week’s end. Though it might seem my brain channels the New York Times or the United Nations, it is not so.

Contrary to the political, economical and geographical shifts that the Times articles addresses with such a population, in my small little spot on the couch at dawn, I thought about Story. I thought how there are numerous people within a few hundred meters of where I sat waking, or putting off waking, to a new day that will be seen through their eyes in a particular way, with interactions and movements and emotions that will be somewhat dictated by interactions, emotions, justices and injustices inflicted upon them or by them from the previous day, month and years. There are things that happened in some other place they used to call home that made them feel like they could conquer the world or that felt like the world already conquered them. They have fathers or mothers, uncles or friends that sparked their fire or wounded their soul in a unique manner that eventually brought them to this moment at dawn on a new day.

Beyond those few hundred meters, and further out into the global reach, I thought how there are close to 7,000,000,000,000 other stories starting or ending, with their own set of plot twists, being told in their own unique way, such a unique way that it will never be told again. That’s a lot of stories.

I am not as brave as the Atheists and Darwinists, and so consider the Author that is writing these stories, intermingling them, doing his/her own version of a “cross-over” show. I consider all the books I have read with all their characters and plots and can hardly remember the details of most. The ones I do recall stand out, most likely, because I resonate with an aspect of their story or they remind me of who I hope to be while, also, reminding me of who I am not. But even then, I only remember a portion of their tale, and that is merely a fictional character. I can’t keep track of it all the way the Author does.

Which brings me back to that morning as I pondered the seven billion. What it must be like to see all those stories at once and alone. What a delight must come from such an experience. Though I am not even in the same galaxy of all-knowing and all seeing, I know and see plenty of stories right around me in the small town in which I live. Unfortunately, I miss their telling more than I would like because I am far too self-absorbed in trying to figure out where my own story is headed. More to the point, in doing so I miss how their story and my story are telling One even bigger than either of us can wrap our imaginations around(and I say “imagination” as opposed to “mind” because in my experience the mind does quite a share of restricting whimsy and wonder, which are the playgrounds of the imagination.)

I will never grasp what seven billion means. It is far too abstract a size when it comes to people’s lives. I can’t even grasp the hundred thousand in my small town. It’s complicated and beautiful. And so are we. Even on a given day, over a cup of coffee sitting on the couch in the shadows as the sun comes up once again, reminding me that it rises on the good and the evil, the rich and the poor, the ones I know and the ones half a world away in an utterly different culture and language I will never know. And that is grace for the receiving in a story, and especially so a World, much in need of it.

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it." - Martha Graham

Wonder Wake-up

2011-09-16T13:23:00.001-06:00

Wonder Wake-up, originally uploaded by iamkr.

It’s raining outside, in the dark of night. Every so often I can hear the splash of cars splitting the waters in the trenched out blacktop street. I haven’t heard rain in quite some time. And actually listened.

A few days ago, sitting down to a cup of coffee by a small river near Durango, there was a fog lifting off the water in the coolness. I looked up river to see a falcon flying no more than fifteen feet above the water with a freshly caught trout jumping in it’s taloned grip. This bird and fish coasted down the river a few hundred yards then swung around as if it forgot something, only to fly back up the river again.

I was caught between awe and uncomfortable. Awe is the appropriate response to such a happening. No amount of talking about it, photographing it will ever capture the moment for it was just that… a moment. The discomfort, though, came from that grown-up part of me that felt the little kid in me jump up and say out loud “Whoa!” The discomfort was realizing that in such an awesome moment, I was out of practice in being childlike.

Just over the pass from where we were, years earlier I had my first encounter with a moose cow and her calf. I was still a bit of a calf myself at age 12. Walking back from fishing a bend in the river I nearly bumped into these two beast. Quicker than a squirrel I was up the nearest tree, rod in hand, as this behemoth of a mother came charging at me, grunting and snorting. I was trapped for almost an hour in that tree, as we stared each other down. Well, she was glaring, and I was smiling and chuckling at not so much the absurdity – I was too young to know what absurd looked like – but the awesomeness of what was happening. Fear was simply part of the excitement and wonder that came with such a uniquely natural reality – not something to be recreated in any other context, especially digitally.

Only a few days after that moose encounter, I was standing on a pull-out halfway down Wolf Creek Pass, looking across the Archuleta line as the San Juan flowed into the valley. During that one moment of wonder I muttered to myself or at least imagined that some day I would live in Colorado. Only a few years later I loaded up my Landcruiser and drove to a ranch outside of Creede that became the launching place for what has become nearly twenty years of one adventure after another.

Somewhere in those years, in the growing older, if not up, I came to believe that a childlike wonder wasn’t fit for a man my age. I say “believe” because no matter what we claim to believe, and there are plenty of us that state a lot out loud about what we believe, it is what we live that most honestly reflects our beliefs. Then moments like that falcon on the river shatters grown illusions because that no amount of older propriety can hold back the truly childlike part that responds with giddy awe.

Oddly enough the resistance isn’t grown-up, mature common sense. For as L’Engle said, “Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be childlike involves memory, we must never forget any part of ourselves.” So my discomfort in that moment says more about my immaturity than anything else. It would seem to be mature is to be free enough to not be so threatened by all the parts that make us human. To be mature is to be comfortable with wonder. And the great thing that comes with age is seeing the abstract multiple layers that make something, or some one wonder-full.

My maturity just needed a wake up call that foggy morning. Coffee wasn’t cut out for the job. As the rain falls and the cars splash in the dark my sense of wonder still is awake, and listening.

Dues Luedens: Telling Secrets

2011-08-07T10:50:00.004-06:00

Telling Secrets, originally uploaded by iamkr.

”It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are – even if we tell it only to ourselves – because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing.” - F. Buechner

It seems the space for telling is often best when we Play. This year on Orcas Island, surrounded by new and old friends, some who are the top in their field and others finding out that they too can play in those fields, I received the space to tell that secret. It came sometimes to friends and sometimes just to my self, remembering The Real Thing.

What I found most enjoyable and rich during this time at Kindling’s Fest was the conversations over a scotch and cigar or a glass of wine with friends with no pretensions or expectations other than to be honest enough to be present. And that, I forget, is a rarity. Yet, it seems to be the thing we all look for. Amidst so much tectonic economic, culture, and global shifts I suspect the majority of us desire a few good people with whom we can be honest enough to be present. And the trick of is, it’s not necessarily something we can force into creation.

Throughout the week there were phrases of wisdom dropped like parachutes of chocolates:

- ”We can have sure words, but we can’t have the last word.” - Jerry Root. And this is something both humbling and reassuring. I try too often to have the last word, to say “this thing is certain,” but that has more to do with seeking false security than trusting there is far more going on than I can see or understand.

- ”If you have to go through Hell, keep going.” - Winston Churchill. Something I forget is that just because circumstances might be hellish it doesn’t mean they always will be. Churchill knew so many times what it was to go through Hell, and he did indeed keep going… straight on to become one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, fore-seeing the ominous darkness of Hitler almost ten years before anyone else gave it a thought.

- ”I want my self, not my idea of my self. I want God, not my idea of God.” - C.S. Lewis. Words I have heard before but all the same not old and worn out. Reminds me of L’Engle’s, “We have a Point of View, but God has View.” How often I hold tightly to my idea of things of people and ultimately God - even in my more atheistic moments – and how small those ideas are from the Real Thing, from who they Truly and Fully are.

- ”Dancing is sculpture in Motion.” - Jerry Root. I made the journey from Seattle to Orcas with four members of The Størling Dance Company getting to know them and them me, in our long, weary-travaled state, which tends to reveal the most honest parts of us that we would rather hide. Then I saw them dance over the following days and saw something I never noticed before. Each one of them had their own style of dance, their own personality in moving and creating their sculpture – all wonder-filled. It changes the way I see others. For each of us moves through life dancing a sculpture that is unique to who we are. Some are professionals – comfortable in their skin and masters of the dance – and some are still learning where their dance begins. Watching these new friends dance, makes me want to become better at my own “dance.”

As with all good things, there is far more that happened than there words and time can share. The good came in many forms and faces. I am grateful for the moments of telling secrets about who we truly and fully are, for remembering that “the Real Thing” is much better to live out of than what the world will find more acceptable.

And it seems appropriate to stumble upon those words of Buechner the morning after my return, they give summation to something I wasn’t quite sure how to sum up.

7 Years Later...

2011-07-21T11:39:00.004-06:00

Shadow of Flight, originally uploaded by iamkr.

July is nearly over and with its end comes this blog’s 7th anniversary.

I flipped back through the digital pages of previous Julys all the way back to post number one. Seven years isn’t that long in real life, but it is an eternity in the digital one. I now write stuff on this new toy called an iPad – which wasn’t even on our conceptual radar in 2004. Twitter didn’t exist. Facebook was only a few months old and not available to real world adults yet. Which is to say that there was far less time spent on the Interwebs and more time reading physical books, having real-life conversations, and the circle of people in my life was far smaller.

When I see my writing back then, it seems like a little kid learning how to ride a bike. I have a vague memory of house and dog-sitting for some friends (who have three children now and no dogs) around the 4th of July weekend. I sat at their dining room table and wrote those first words while crickets played their fiddle legs outside the open windows.

I started a blog because I had very little confidence as a Writer and figured I had to get used to perfect strangers reading my words; I had to bring into light and let grow or die whatever may come. Much of what I wrote in those early posts were something akin to the thoughts in my head, the conversations from the inside thrown on to pages outside. And they read as such. The early days weren’t well formed, and the thoughts scattered. The quality and content of my Writing then is somewhat embarrassing now. A bit too Christian-y for my taste now, but that change is a result of learning to communicate such concepts and thoughts in a larger dialect and, hopefully, with a refined quality.

As far as I can tell, I have also made quite a few friends through this blog – real friends in real life. Erin Ivey stumbled upon this blog while on hiatus in Peoria, IL and while stepping into her own right as a singer-songwriter whose star keeps rising higher and higher (Buy her latest album Broken Gold). The ever-comic Chris Mundell and I became friends initially through his webpage and continue to be long-distance mates, but have shared a birthday party with his youngest while on a stopover in Santa Barabara. Through him I met the multi-talented Greg Lawler and in that friendship began a new chapter of my life as a Photographer. I got to interview singer-songwriter Matthew Ryan, Writer/Director Gary Lundgren about his film ”Calvin Marshall”. And that’s just to name a few.

Greg Wolfe wrote, "We often go through life avoiding intimate encounters with the 'Other,' whether that be God, family, or friends. Great art puts us in touch with the presence of the other." If anything has come of learning the art of Writing with a bigger audience in mind, it has created intimate encounters with so many 'others.'

Over the years I started submitting my writings to various publications and have since been published in various genres and mediums, getting paid ever so little, but paid all the same, for much of what I write. Which is part of the reason I haven’t written more here in the recent months.

My Writing has evolved with its own confidence much like I did over all those years as a Mountaineering Guide. When I began guiding I read all the books I needed, got the training, knew how to read a map and shoot a bearing, light a stove, cook a meal and patch a wound while leading groups into new physical, emotional and spiritual spaces. As the years went by, though, there were quite a few things I was not conscious of anymore, that I simply did because of experience. It wasn’t until eight or nine years later, guest-guiding a trip with an old friend who was only in his 2nd year as a guide that I was made aware of this. After a week on the trail together – one in which I made a risky call to not evacuate a client suffering from HAPE - he noticed I didn’t stop to think about so many of the things he was used to thinking about. I simply did it and moved on; seemingly sure it would work out. Or to put it more simply, I did not spend a lot of time pondering the small decisions because things tend to work out how they will regardless of how much thought I put into it. That was something that could only come with numerous trips and miles filled with lightning, illness, landslides, and hundreds of life-stories.

So it is with Writing. I still ask certain questions I have always asked – a form of editing on the go – but I spend less time worrying about the responses, maybe. My writing voice, though something always growing, is less a stranger and more a rhythm. I enjoy playing with words more now than I did 7 years ago and that may be because I feel more friendly with them.

Still, I am just getting started. Like I said, 7 years isn’t all that long. In some instances I feel like that metaphorical plane finally rolled out of the hangar, may be taxing around the airport a bit; it may have even done some test flights, but I have yet to feel like I have thrown it full throttle and let fly long and loud.

Maybe it is time to stop taxiing the runway. I no longer need clearance from the Tower. I just need to take my foot off the brakes, push that throttle forward and seeing how this baby handles in flight….

Can We Fail Into Restoration?

2011-05-28T10:40:00.002-06:00

Tunnel Vision - Day 245, originally uploaded by iamkr.

While standing amidst a crowd in the upper room of the Boulder Bookstore to listen to one author, I caught site of a book by Wendell Berry that I have never seen. Before the title page, I read a quote from Malcolm X:”But I want to tell you something. This pattern, this ‘system’ that the white man created, of teaching Negroes to hide the truth from him behind a façade of grinning, ‘yessir-bossing,’ foot-shuffling and head-scratching - that system has done the American white man more harm than an invading army would do to him.” It draws me to the first chapter in which Berry confesses, ”I have been unwilling until now to open in myself what I have known all along to be a wound – a historical wound, prepared centuries ago to come alive in me at my birth like a hereditary disease…if white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost as been greater perhaps than we can yet know.” So begins Berry’s uncomfortable, poignant navigation of The Hidden Wound.

Why was Berry writing about race, about slavery, about the unaddressed effects of it on the souls of white folks? I thought he told stories of small town farming communities. I thought he wrote essays challenging the urban industrial mindset that neglects the land, fracturing the humanity in Americans.

It’s the wound he’s after. It’s a wound I have mulled over and contemplated, too, as a white male, especially growing up in Texas where Mexicans were derided as easily as a black man is in Alabama. It’s a thing I see even living in a town that prides itself on its liberalism and “progressive-thinking” but is populated by nearly only white people. The liberal approach of making abashed, indirect acknowledgements of racism - a posture that looks more like shameful apology than honest confession, acceptance and healing – doesn’t work. Neither does the more obvious posture of irritated generalizations about “Negroes,” made under breath; the “that was over hundred years ago and can’t they just get over it” kind of statements heard amongst more conservative bents.

The genius of Berry’s book, though, is not just addressing the complicated elephant in the room of every white person’s heart. It is connecting that abstract wound to the very concrete fractured nature of every white person’s striving in the corporate, industrialized world. He goes so far as to question why we think it’s progress if a black man wears a suit and tie in corporate America: “The ‘success’ of the black corporate executive, in fact, only reveals the shallowness, the jeopardy, and falseness of the ‘success’ of the white corporate executive. The ‘success’ is a private and highly questionable settlement that does not solve, indeed does not refer to, the issues associated with American racism. It only assumes that American blacks will be made better or more useful or more secure by becoming as greedy, selfish, wasteful and thoughtless as affluent American whites.”

There is wholeness in Berry’s exploration for an answer. At the beginning of the book he says ” A work of art that grows out of a diseased culture has not only the limits of art but the limits of the disease – if it is not an affirmation of the disease, it is a reaction against it. The art of a man divided within himself and against his neighbors, no matter how sophisticated its techniques or beautiful its form and textures, will never have the communal power of the simplest tribal song.” He sets a precedent, subtle as it may be throughout the writing, that this hidden wound is not just a matter of reversing wrongs, but of addressing a disease that effects every aspect of culture, and thus community. A community is formed out of human beings BEING together healthily. The best art comes out of these spaces, and the best art tends to be a tell-tale sign of the more subtle thrivings in a culture, a visual or audible display of things unseen.

It is in his “Afterword” – written nearly 20 years after the fact – that he draws some of his harshest statements but also his age-earned wisdom that the issue more deeply has to do with our character. ”All the issues I have discussed here are neither political nor economic, but moral and spiritual. What is at issue is our character as a people.” And if we choose not to deal with that, then we will fail. But it is how he says there is the possibility that we will “fail into a restoration of community life,” that gives a new angle of hope. We are humans and by nature fail, but it seems truer still that we tend to fail into restoration. For when we fail, we are finally honest enough to let go the facades and shallow placations that keep us from seeing another human being across the table. It is then that the color of our skin matters in a more authentic sense as it tells a story of our heritage, our culture, and what you or I bring to the table.

even if it’s sunday may I be wrong

2011-04-09T12:09:00.001-06:00

Idea - Day 312, originally uploaded by iamkr.

I popped into various panels at The Conference on World Affairs over the week. As each panelist gave their thoughts on a given topic there was a generosity in their speech no matter how much they might have disagreed with another on the panel. When it came to the Q&A times, though, there was a possessiveness among the audience that stood in dark contrast to such generosity.

In a panel discussion on “Practicing Religion in a Pluralist Society” there were two Muslims, one Jew, and another Jew converted to Buddhism. Each gave their take on the topic, mostly revolving around the need to move away from divisive postures within each individuals religion, and move towards more friendship, less tolerance, more acceptance. A Jew who teaches in Jerusalem sitting next to a Muslim from Iran traded thoughts, laughing and respecting what the other said, and agreeing more than not with each other.

Through out the discussion an older man and woman behind me made under the breath commentary on how they were Atheist and these scholars were missing the point. During the Q&A three different men stood to ask questions that were more angry than inquisitive, more about their need to make a statement (as if they were mad they hadn’t been asked to be on the panel). An older white man prefaced that he was an Atheist. Then he tried to make a point, without asking a question, that religions were the source of so many atrocities, the murders of so many humans across the centuries, and thus, proposing it would be better to not have religion in the first place, not realizing that his ardent declarations of Atheism sounded like the religious zealotry he so condemned. A man possessed with his need to be right.

The Islamic panelist from Iran, Mohammad Ja’far Mahallati responded to him pointing out that Atheism was the basis of Communist Russia and so responsible for the extermination of 100,000,000 people during it’s 80 year existence. But he did it in such a way that was not condescending, that was in the spirit of generosity. He spoke in the manner of two friends who might discuss serious topics without taking themselves too seriously in the process. Though the older white man had sat down, he steamed in his seat, turning red and trying to make a rebuttal, again emphasizing his posture of possessiveness.

Later in the week , I sat in a discussion about “How and Idea becomes Art.” The panel was just as diverse and the room just as packed. As each panel member gave their take on the creative process, they tended to build on what the previous speaker said. During the Q&A, they each engaged the questions as if they were the ones being taught and challenged. The whole experience for both audience and speakers was one of learning from each other, of humility without shame, of generosity.

It was in this that I started thinking about how we talk with each other. Everybody has an opinion and at day’s end they are nothing more than opinions. No matter how vehement and forceful a language one uses, it doesn’t change the base truth that what you are saying is opinion and one perspective. The Rabbis say that there are as many interpretations of Torah as there were people when God spoke Torah on Mt. Sinai, and I would say as many views on what they each saw, too. How well each perspective is heard is determined by how generous each one is spoken, and listened to.

E.E. Cummings wrote:
”May my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men show not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s Sunday may I be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young”

And may we each learn to be generous enough to not be so possessive about being right.

Still An Awfully Big Adventure

2011-02-18T21:23:00.005-07:00

Up - Day 357, originally uploaded by iamkr.

Over coffee with a friend, I was trying my best to answer the “What’s been going on? How are you?” question without turning on a fire hydrant. A few days earlier I made the drive to Colorado Springs for my second memorial service in two weeks. The first one, provoked me to write ”An Awfully Big Adventure,” posted a few weeks ago. That was a celebration of life a well lived over nearly 90 years. This second memorial service was for a 12-year-old girl - a “wordless life,” a life short-lived but profoundly impactful. As I responded to my friend’s question, I was still putting the pieces together of the juxtaposition of these two deaths. What came about was a conversation of the Western avoidance of pain, of suffering and sorrow, and therefore, a Western misfortune of never really knowing true Joy.

Sometime later I was re-reading something Paul Tillich wrote sixty years ago that sums it so concisely:
“Joy seems to be the opposite of pain. But we know that pain and joy can exist together. Not joy but pleasure is the opposite of pain. There are people who believe that man’s life is a continuous flight from pain and a persistent search for pleasure. I have never seen a human being of whom that is true. It is true only of beings who have lost their humanity…”

It is not news that our society spends quite a bit of money and energy to avoid pain in the name of being happy, (maybe missing the difference between happiness and joy in the process). Pain killers, Pharmaceutical advertising, “reality” TV, the “Entertainment” industry, to name a few examples. And when it comes to death, well, somehow it is a believable and “reasonable” pursuit of science to seek some solution to the disease they call dying. So, it is not so surprising that Tillich’s words ring a larger, deeper resonate bell today than when he wrote them.

But Joy is not the absence of pain or suffering and this never ceases to be shocking news. Sometimes Joy is all on its own, pure and shining radiant. Most of the time, it is an all too familiar bedfellow with pain and suffering; maybe it is because it is so much the more recognizable as Joy when seen in the midst of Pain.

In my experience, my desire to be fully human carries the expectation of both Joy and Sorrow, and sometimes in the same room. Also, in my experience, I meet legions who strive vehemently to live only on the Joy side - they tend to have as much authenticity as a three-dollar bill, they have “lost their humanity.” There are just as many who waddle in sorrow and pain, tossing more onto their back just when it seems to be washing away. They may make for great rock stars and folk artists, but they don’t seem to live very long. (Just ask Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, or Elliott Smith.) And most that live on this dark end of the spectrum aren’t talented enough to turn a profit from their mud. They, too, have lost their humanity.

So where does that leave us? Could it be that to be fully human and fully alive we must live the full spectrum of joy and sorrow, giving each its due?

As my friend Nigel says, ”Always follow the tears. They lead to something more real, beautiful.” Sometimes it is Joy, sometimes Pain… and somehow both are of the same substance.

Below is the story of 12 year old Hadley, or more so, the bigger story of her life and death and how her “wordless life” spoke volumes into her family’s story.

A Little Bit of Revolution...

2011-02-03T16:54:00.003-07:00

Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt at Night (NASA, International Space Station Science, 10/28/10), originally uploaded by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

I tend to avoid reading any news before noon. Why spoil the morning? But then I somehow think it is fine to check Facebook and emails while my coffee brews. Depending on the chatter that too could spoil a morning.

On Facebook, a friend posted a piece from the AtlanticWire.com about a certain Superbowl ad that was pulled by the network because it was: ”advancing particular beliefs or practices.” Which seems to be against their policy. The ad in question revolves around an icon of televised sports – “John 3:16.” Something so common on broadcasts sports that even the Simpsons gave it air time. The ad is quite benign:

The Atlantic article also posts a clip of Foxnews discussing the potential offensive nature of a certain Doritos Ad that has a bit of fun with Communion wafers replaced by Doritos.

As I continued to scroll through the Facebook mumbo-jumbo, there was another post by the same friend about a message he had received from Egypt: “From a friend in Egypt-another demonstration of the law of unintended consequences! "Christians and Muslims have been united as never before defending their homes on overnight shifts (due to the lack off police security) this is resulting for many to make friends with neighbors they never knew and there is a real sense of camaraderie which we never had before."

What a contrast between the trivial and the extraordinary. In the States, enormous amounts of energy and money is spent over something so benign and unimportant as advertising and perceived offenses of the religious, while neighbors in Egypt with differing religious devotions are losing sleep and safety to watch the other’s homestead.

As much as this dichotomy offers up yet another occasion to rant about the decadent shallowness of American television, and to some degree, culture, it is the Egypt story that shines above the dregs. Ever since the Towers fell, Islam has been targeted as an enemy of the States, and many U.S. “Christians” have embraced such rhetoric; as if the Anti-Christ seems to have a face and it looks like Mohammed. All the while, when chaos and “terror” are just down the block, a human face is the only thing Egyptian Christians and Muslims see next door.

When I consider the Reality that these Egyptians are fleshing out, I want to be more like them. I would hope in similar circumstances I would be right along side them, creating space for a neighbor to go into his time of prayer with peace of mind, (and not just a piece of my mind).

The banter over advertising, which costs $3,000,000 for ½ a minute, is a waste of creative faculties all on its own, a celebrating the mundane and absurd. The news out of Egypt should end the discussion straight out as neighbors discovered that sticks and stones are the things that break bones and homes, not thirty seconds on Sunday.

Maybe a little bit of revolution is good for us all once in awhile, after all… even if it is another’s revolution.

An Awfully Big Adventure

2011-01-26T15:51:00.001-07:00

Like a Plot - Day 348, originally uploaded by iamkr.

I was at a funeral the other day.Not the kind full of awkward silences or avoiding eyes contact. Not the kind where they try to shine you on with talks of a better place and it’s all an attempt to celebrate without tears. No. This was the kind that is full of laughter and, tears and storytelling because the life the ended was lived so well it was something to laugh about, to cry that it is over, and to share the stories that she made of the life she was given.

In the past couple of years I have been to as many funerals as weddings. The young join the chapters of their story while the old write the last words to theirs. And both are good.

Frederick Buechner, a man who has written his share of stories and lived them, starts off his final memoir with these words:
“E.M. Forster says that a story is a narrative of events arranged chronologically as in ‘the king died, and then the queen died,’ whereas a plot although also a narrative of events, concentrates more on the because of things as in ‘the king died, and then the queen died of grief’…Have I concocted a plot out of what is only a story? Who knows? I can say only that to me life in general, including my life in particular, feels like a plot, and I find that a source both of strength and of fascination.”

I am sure there are those to whom life feels very much like nothing more than a plotless story – events happening in some order with no sense of “because.” The life we were grieving and celebrating the other day was truly full of all kinds of twists and turns – the stuff of plot. As one of her friends of over forty years said, “We are not here because she died. We are here because she lived!” Now that is something I can only hope will be said when I have breathed my last and gone the way of the dodo.

What, then, makes for a life lived? What makes for plot? Is it something we create or is it something that happens to us? Is it merely an unexamined life that sees no plot?

Joining the Party Before You

2010-12-16T11:22:00.001-07:00

Mischa reads , originally uploaded by iamkr.

This is about joy, about celebration and joining the party.

Awhile back I was with a friend in an ICU waiting room a few days into what would become the last two months of his wife’s life. There was a moment when he said to me, in the oncoming dusk and darkness of that room, ”You know the story of the Prodigal Son and how when he returns the Father is throwing an extravagant party? And the Older Brother is standing outside that party resentful and unsure if he can walk through the door into that celebration? Whatever comes of this, I don’t want to be standing outside like that Older Brother. I want to join the celebration.” His words towards joy were about as far from what I expected in that situation, and full of the wisdom that 72 years of living – 47 of that married to the woman now in a coma around the corner – can only find.

That was about 18 months ago, and I revisit those words over and again as I, too, am still learning how to join the celebration. Buechner wrote about that Older Brother: ”He is a caricature of all that is joyless and petty and self-serving about all of us. The joke of it is that of course his father loves him even so, and has always loved him and will always love him, only the elder brother never noticed it because it was never love he was bucking for but only his due. The fatted calf, the best Scotch, the hoedown could all have been his, too, any time he asked for them except that he never thought to ask for them because he was too busy trying cheerlessly and religiously to earn them. “ And those trying to earn what is free to receive, their number is legion.

I know, more than I would like to admit, that I can count myself as one of the cheerless who never thought to ask. The trick of it all is that in never asking for a party, the Older Brother never learned how to enjoy one when it was happening right before him. It is, like most things, something to be learned anew, something that can get lost along the way to adulthood. I keep getting the opportunity to celebrate and embrace the joy before me, and ever so slowly I am letting myself receive it, walk through the metaphorical door into the music and lights and cocktails and dancing. How else am I going to learn to live in the joy if I don’t try it on and wear it around town more?

It might be that time of year when the list of parties on the calendar is more than any can manage, but this isn’t just about social gatherings and awkward conversations in bad sweaters. There is plenty to celebrate, more than enough parties to join in the day at hand. And, don’t forget the context of my friend’s words. They were not spoken with birds singing, and sun shining, and all things going his way. They came in the midst of the most difficult space to hold in a marriage, “in sickness and in death.” I watched over the months, and over the year as he continually stepped into those moments of celebration. He still is.

Years ago, when I was boy I never batted an eye at being joyful, at engaging a celebration – I idled there. Now, I am learning again, and again, how to live in the joy as Life comes to me in the dark places outside and says, “I love you even so, and have always loved you and always will. Come join the party.”

Sufjan Stevens song, “Joy, Joy, Joy” says and plays it true:

You have to join the party sometime.

The Strange(r) Idea of Joy

2010-11-30T11:54:00.003-07:00

back light, originally uploaded by iamkr.

I am inclined to explore what makes for Joy. We all too often mistake Happiness for Joy. But Joy tends to be something that goes underneath, that is there for the choosing regardless of circumstances – happy they may be or sorrowful. Paul Tillich once wrote ”Joy is nothing else than the awareness of our being fulfilled in our true being…and it is possible only if we unite ourselves with what others really are. It is Reality that gives joy, and Reality alone…Mere pleasure, in yourselves and in all other beings, remains in the realm of illusion about reality. Joy is born out of union with Reality itself.” He insist that joy – which is different from happiness – is not afraid of the deepest aspects of who we really are. I would add, because who we really are is far more than who we delude ourselves into thinking we are. And this is, after all, the season of Joy, right?

To explore what joy might look like as it comes up from underneath, I will be starting The Strange(r) Idea of Joy Project, inspired by Chris Orwig’s work, to explore what Reality can look like in Strangers through the eye of the lens, during a time of year often called “The Season of Joy.” The idea is to push myself out of my introverted ness and take at least one picture/portrait a day of someone I do not know for the month of December.

Bookmark The Strange(r) Idea of Joy and starting December 1st, a new portrait will be posted everyday, along with a collection of the previous days, until December 31st.

In Need of Repair

2010-11-09T10:32:00.004-07:00

Shattered - Day 269, originally uploaded by iamkr.

I was scraped up a bit in a recent Scooter vs. SUV accident. I was on the scooter end and my Macbook got smashed in the process. That’s what happens when you lay one down at 20 MPH and slide for 30 meters down the street. As I have been going about the aftermath – cleaning wounds, changing bandages, negotiating insurance, and trying to get my Macbook fixed – I have had an underlying frustration. The Apple Genius’ showed their not-so-genius side in messing up the repair and the estimate, and the whole process has been a bit aggravating. But I have had quite a bit more energy in this one area than seems necessary. So I started asking, “Why?”

Our world is smashed quite a bit. It’s in a state of constant repair. Our lives are smashed up a bit, too. Our hearts. Our relationships. Our communities. Our economics. Nearly every avenue of existence is either in the process of or yearning for repair, to be made whole.

I have moments where this reality sinks in and it’s not so much a sadness, but a sense of grace, of “ah ha” that leads to perspective and breathing deep. These things are true and, yes, repair is desired, needed, longed for, and – in most realms – actually happening, but slowly.

So, when something comes along that needs repair and can actually, quickly, be fixed but isn’t… well… it’s a bit frustrating. Which got me to thinking about how companies work. What if a company like Apple – a company that has an enormous amount of capital at hand and prides itself on innovation and design – what if they approached Customer Service with this perspective on repair? What if a company simply approached their customers with the reality that there are a lot of things in this world that need repair and will take years to remedy, but their product is not one of them? What if companies saw repair and customer service as a way of making teshuva, so to speak, creating a mitzvah and so in their little part of the universe they can make things whole? How would this change business? How would this effect the people that buy their products? Maybe then we would have one less area of life that needs repair.

My physical wounds will turn to scars and sooner or later I will forget about the accident. Our bodies are quite astounding at their ability to repair with very little from us. As a Paramedic said to me once, ”For all the ways I have seen human bodies torn and damaged, it never ceases to amaze me that each patient continues to live. The ability for the body to repair itself… well, clearly we were designed for the eternal.”

There are plenty of things in life that are easy to fix, to repair, to change for the whole. It doesn’t take much to do the right thing. But it does seem to take some thought, some drops of humanity…

UPDATE: Apple restored my faith in their company. When I went to pick up my supposedly fixed Macbook after it had spent four days in some repair depot, it was still warped and not fixed. When I explained that this was now my 3rd time at the store for this reapair, she took my Mac back to see if it could be fixed and then decided to simply replace it... with a brand new Macbook Pro, top of the line.
The human touch wins out again.

What Makes an Imaginative Life?

2010-10-21T12:36:00.006-06:00

Bunny's Talk to God? - Day 217, originally uploaded by iamkr.

Malcolm Muggeridge said, “Only mystics, clowns, and artists, in my experience, speak the truth, which, as Blake keeps insisting, is perceptive to the imagination rather than the mind.”

To live a good life is to live a truthful life and to live a truthful life, in light of Muggeridge’s words, is to live a creative, imaginative life. Yet, we live in a culture that not only offers us a rather un-imaginative idea of the good life, but does its damndest to convince us that this consumerist version of the “good life” is the only life worth living – and if you make enough money, you can buy it online, or at the local shopping mall.

In the past ten days: I spent a weekend in the mountains chopping wood with an old friend surrounded by autumn colors, said goodbye to his dog that I’ve watched live the best life a dog could ask for running free in the mountains for most of his 12+ years; a photography installation I recently launched was part of the background for a day of broadcasting on Fox News Business; I flew to Seattle on a Thursday to spend the day with two boisterous men eating battered salmon and chowder on a barge, shopping for flowers in Pikes Place Market, then we drove I-90 to a chalet in the mountains where we ended the day drinking good wine and scotch talking life, love, theology, and what it means to be fully human; this theme of good food, good drink and diverse, thoughtful conversation carried on through the weekend as the nine other artists, actors, writers, and poets arrived the following day. The weekend ended sitting on a park bench in the Queen Anne district overlooking the Seattle skyline at dusk.

And it was on that park bench that I thought on how this snapshot of my life is beyond anything I could have made up myself if left to my own devices. It is a rich, colorful, flush with grace, good life. It is, also, the things that didn't make that snapshot; the private conversations about hard things, the unanswerable crossroads in men's lives, or the frustrated miscommunications between two friends that ended in tears or silence; the moments in my own and those around me where it feels like nothing but another trip into the salt mines of daily existence. This, too, is a grace. It is a gift, a gift of imagination from the One with the wisdom and creative power to imagine something more than I could. And it is in the dynamic intimacy with such a Creator that a truthful life is crafted.

This is not something you can order online or out of a catalog, or that the best of American advertising can offer.

So does an imaginative life reverberate a truthful life? Not so much fantastical, but a creatively imaginative life? And does the imaginative life we set out to make only become truthful, and thus truly good, in relationship with the One who imagined a life in our making? Or is it something we can come up with on our own?

And how do we do so without perpetuating what Ingmar Bergman said: “the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other…”?

Parabled Light

2010-10-04T12:21:00.002-06:00

Parabled Light, originally uploaded by iamkr.

In high school, I would sit on the crown of our roof at sunset and watch the show that happened every day as the sun disappeared into the Texas horizon. I am pretty sure the neighbors thought the Ruth kid had gone ‘round the bend, but what they didn’t know is that I was caught up with the light, and the Light. This fascination with Light played out wherever I ventured - in the predawn mornings in the San Juan mountains week in and out as a guide, or across various oceans on the back of a surfboard, or gazing out a window café in New York, Boulder, Austin. But I didn’t start to capture those moments of light with a camera until just a few years ago – first with in 120/Medium format film, and then digitally.

When asked to put together an installation of my photography for Boulder’s Atlas Purveyors it was this play of light that came to mind. As a writer, I see stories being told through the images I capture. So the pictures I choose and the sequence in which they are hung must tell a story or a parable of sorts.

The result is an installation now at Atlas Purveyors through December titled, “Parabled Light.” Parables are short, concise stories that speak to those truths underneath, greater truths we would not see directly. Without Light we would not be able to see what is in the dark. As C. S. Lewis wrote: “We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it, so that for us light is on the edge.” Or as he said elsewhere, “…I believe the sun is risen not only because I see it but by it I see everything else.”

This installation is an exploration of how light and Light not only illuminates the dark, but how it is by Light we see everything else.

If you are in the area, in Colorado, make the trip to 1505 Pearl St. in Boulder and grab and tea or latte and check out the near twenty images on display and available for purchase at Atlas.

(Thanks to Gabe Cano and the gang at SCS Color Services for helping pull this show together with such amazing prints in such a short amount of time.)

Quality Timelessness

2010-09-15T15:41:00.002-06:00

Hugs- Day 221, originally uploaded by iamkr.

All my life I’ve been set, by my self and those around me, with the ongoing task of growing up, growing older. The larger culture beckons me to grow up while placing Youthfulness and staying young on the altar; asking for my allegiance, my worship. Quite the paradoxical existence and a crazy making formula if ever there was one.

Maybe it’s not so much a Wrong as it is a Truth askew? After all, most of the lies that dictate a life are not opposites, but slight bendings of the Real; just enough to convince us to drink it down day in and out with the morning coffee. What if there is something to this growing up while growing young?

Consistently, when I am quiet enough to hear the Truth, he says, “Be like a child, trust like a child, engage life like a child, like my child.” What kind of child? Not an orphan, or homeless street kid; nor as some brat throwing fits and never satisfied. To be like a child who knows he is loved just because he does.

And I tend to follow that up with my question, “yeah, but what does that look like in the day-to-day?”

I think it looks something like how Buechner poses it at the beginning of his memoir,”The Sacred Journey”:
“What child, while summer is happening, bothers to think much that summer will end? What child, when snow is on the ground, stops to remember that not long ago the ground was snowless? It is by its content rather than its duration that a child knows time, by its quality rather than its quantity…”

To be present enough to appreciate the quality of the people, the happenings, the things right before me instead of checking my wrist or cell phone or ToDo list, or Facebook or Twitter, or BBC.com, etc. To enjoy the sun in September in the green grass regardless of the heat, because there will be days a plenty covered in snow and cold and scarfs and watching a breath in the morning light. It’s this and so much more.

It is knowing time by its quality and content instead of its surplus or scarcity. And only a child can be present enough to do that. It takes a certain kind of grownup, though, too… one that learns that growing up is about growing young.

It's More than One Thing

2010-09-09T13:22:00.001-06:00

Wall - Day 90
Originally uploaded by iamkr

I had to drive to Golden to meet a friend for a run on the Apex trail. Had being the operative word because the smoke was so bad in Boulder from the Four Mile Fire that exercise anywhere in town was like smoking a pack of cigarettes all at once. The inversion at night (when the upper atmospheric air falls to ground-level) was soaking the evening in smoke-filled bleh and made sleep hard. I hadn’t slept well in two nights because I would wake up with a scratchy throat and headache and stuffed up nose. No sleep was making me grumpy. No exercise made me irritable. And the constant smoke and fire set me on edge. And these are just the external factors.

When I wasn’t sleeping for the smoke, I was pondering in the darkness my life and asking questions such as “Am I living the best I can? Am I doing enough? Why do I feel like I am failing? Is there any validity to that feeling? How am I going to get this and that done when I don’t know about the other factors?” And on and on and on. I wasn’t just tired in my physical life, I was tired emotionally and mentally and spiritually.

In other words, it isn’t just one thing. It never is. It’s a whole number of things together that make for a weighed down life, or a short-sighted spirit.

I knew a guy from Belfast, who grew up in The Troubles of Northern Ireland. He told me that one of the ways the IRA would kill people or coerce information out of a man is they would make him lay down on his back, then they would start to stack bricks on his chest, one at a time. Eventually the load would get so heavy that the man would suffocate and die, or the load would crush his chest. It wasn’t one brick that killed him. It was a multitude over time.

Driving back from Golden - feeling quite a bit better for the run and the always in-depth, life-giving conversation between labored breaths with my friend – I could see beyond the smoke and ash in my world. It is here I saw how many bricks were laid upon my chest, that it isn’t just one thing that was disorienting me. The smoke removed. The exercise in play. I was starting to breath again. And I could see then how skewed my perspective was on those internal things, too.

Long past the 99.9%: Leadville 100, pt. 2

2010-08-31T14:49:00.001-06:00

The Winfield Fray - Day 204
Originally uploaded by iamkr

Last summer I wrote about Cindy Henges’ run of the Leadville Trail 100 and the new playground of the heart that seemed to stretch open for me as one of her pacers. Cindy emailed me this last January to let me know she was getting the old crew together again for another go at it. Yes, she suffered amnesia, forgetting completely how insane it was the first time.

She moved to Breckenridge in June to train at altitude, for she had it in mind to finish in under twenty-five hours this year. Since oxygen is in rare supply the higher you get, one might as well get the body used to not having any. When I got back from Texas in July, we were able to get some good hard training runs in, talk about strategy and how to do things better this year. Our Crew went from four to six people – which meant I wasn’t going to be running the first and last legs…just the first… over Hope Pass, again. It, also, meant there were more people to have fun with over the 30+ sleepless hours of the race.

Come race day, 4:00AM Saturday, Cindy was off and running faster than her target time. So fast that she came into the first aide station twenty minutes ahead of that target and the 4th woman overall. Skip ahead to Winfield aid station, eleven hours later, and the 50-mile turn around. She was slowing down. Stomach issues were sucking her energy, her hydration, and her spirits.

Getting up and over Hope Pass was tortuous. Cindy was so calorie deficient that she could hardly keep her balance. We were going through water faster than we were covering tracks. Though she perked up on the downhill run to Twin Lakes, talking about everything under the remaining sun, it was going to be a rough 40 more miles to the finish.

There is a bond and flow of camaraderie that come with a small group of people all focused on a specialized task. It is why we play team sports. It is why soldiers are hold intimate space with other guys from their platoon. And, it is there in Crewing a runner for 30 hours+ of racing. I found myself going through Crew withdrawals the week after the race. I never really tired of these great people.

As a team, we knew Cindy was hurting worse than last year and as the miles and night came and went, we all knew getting her across that finish line was going to be like a Bataan Death March for her. Cindy came into the last aide station just minutes before the cut-off – The point when you are pulled off the course. Desiree had her for the last 13 miles to the finish and I had mentioned to Cindy that I would meet her for the last 6-7 miles if she wanted me to, (having run it with her the previous year).

Those last 6 miles I saw the shell of a person in Cindy. She was not smiling, nor talking like last year.. Desiree was the ever-strategic encourager - giving her space to walk, while pushing her to run as much possible. Between the two of us we were coercing Cindy 50 to 100 meters at a time.

Then, about a mile and half from the finish a group of three (Two runners and one pacer) men came trotting, dragging past us and one of them called out, “It’s a mile to the finish from the pavement!” We had fifteen minutes to get across that finish line. Cindy found some grain of drive left in her heart and started the run. Then she stopped.

At the pavement Desiree said to Cindy, “We will not cross the line in time if you do not run the rest of the way.” Legs burning and shot, Cindy started the uphill climb to the finish once again and this time… she didn’t let up. We could see the clock ticking down ahead and hear the roar of the crowd pulling her to it. They knew she was among the last who had a chance. A quarter-mile out every one knew Cindy’s name and were calling her to that red carpet. Des and I pulled off the course while Cindy ran in as the last woman to finish the Leadville 100 in time.

In those last 2 miles I went from defeat to awe and joy. The odds were so against her and her look and movement seemed to agree. In my head, I was preparing for her to not finish. Turns out, the rest of the crew at the finish line, waiting, was too. How do you walk through the rest of the day with someone who did not finish in such an extreme race? When Cindy started running again on that pavement, those thoughts went out the door. I was witnessing a resurrection and much like those guys that hung around Jesus, I was filled with such speechless awe and wonder at the sight of it all.

The same words from U2 that I quoted last year have even more weight and are the only ones that come to mind when I think of what I witnessed that Sunday morning in Leadville a few days ago:
“Of science and the human heart
There is no limit
There is no failure here sweetheart
Just when you quit...” - “Miracle Drug”

She never quit. Long past when 99.9% of us would, she kept going. And it was beautiful.

Calvin Marshall & Gary Lundgren: The Unabridged Interview

2010-08-27T12:45:00.001-06:00

Curator Magazine published an interview I did with Filmmaker Gary Lundgren about his most recent film “Calvin Marshall”. Publications have word limits. Blogs, on the other hand, don’t. Cutting nearly two-thousand words from the original interview was like having to hide treasures in the ground. So, below is the rest of the interview in its totality.

Writer/Director Gary Lundgren’s film is a story about blind optimism, misguided intentions, redeemed failure and human complexity. Oh and it’s about baseball. The title character, Calvin(Alex Frost), is making another go at the local junior college baseball team, coached by a defeated pro-baller, Coach Little(played by Steve Zahn in one of his best roles to date), who has a soft spot for the passionate, yet failing Calvin. Calvin, also, chases Tori Jensen, (Michelle Lombardo) the gorgeous junior college volleyball star who outshines her teammates so much that they don’t even have names.

“Calvin Marshall” seems to be a character driven dramedy disguised as a baseball movie. Calvin (Alex Frost), Tori (Michelle Lombardo), and Coach Little (Steve Zahn) each are multi-dimensional with their share of secrets, blind-spots, and strengths. Did you always have this in mind as you set out to write and direct this story?

Yeah, this really never was a 'baseball" film in my mind. It was always more of a coming of age story. Even the first draft was subtle and bitter-sweet. Character driven. We always joked that we were making an art film masquerading as a sports film. And I'm drawn to complex characters in movies. My favorite stories and films generally have more realistic characters that are more complicated and possess both good and bad qualities.

Why Baseball?

I suppose Calvin could've been pursing anything, really. But I like the connotations of a protagonist pursuing something connected to the American dream. Baseball has such a rich history in this country. And I, also, played baseball through college so I was excited to say something about the hierarchy of sports in an authentic way. But you're right -- this could've easily been about an aspiring screen actor finally facing the reality of having to walk away from Hollywood.

There is more a redemption theme than a “happy-ending” sense to “Calvin.” How did you come to this ending?

It would've been difficult to spin a believable happy ending with the theme we were pursuing. I was most excited about wrestling with the idea of having to give up that something you desire most in life. And then of course the looming possibility of growing into a bitter person because of it. Coach Little is really just a good guy who can't let go of his bitterness after seeing his dream die. And the bitterness is palpable and killing him slowly. The "happy" ending for me was just seeing Calvin get back on his feet and get moving again. Just to see Calvin begin to recover his great personality and his drive for something new is still inspiring to me. I think overcoming disappointment and bouncing back is the most underrated achievement in life.

Steve Zahn delivers quite possibly his best dramatic performance in “Calvin.” How did he get signed on to the film? How much of Steve Zahn is there in Coach Little that you did not expect when you cast him?

I've always been a huge fan of Steve and it was a dream to get to work with him. Our casting director Christine Sheaks got the script to him back in 2005 and he responded to the character and also liked a short film I directed called ”Wow and Flutter.” So, he stuck with us for a long time until we finally pulled the financing together three years later.

I, obviously, knew Steve was a rare talent going in, but to see him flesh out the character and physically carry himself like an ex-baseball player was so cool to watch. He insisted on being unshaven and having "hat head" for most of the film, which I loved. Steve just has a way of making scripted dialogue feel so organic and real -- and he also knew when to tweak it to make it his own. And yes, we hope people discover the film and see Coach Little as another one of his great performances.

The film is beautifully lit and each scene is distinct in its cinematography. How much thought went into this aspect of making the film? Did you have an image and feel you were shooting for or was it more a collaborative effort?

I love shooting 35mm because it's a richer look yet with a softer image. If you shoot on High Definition (HD), it automatically dates a movie because it's so clean and contemporary-looking. And we used Cooke S4 lenses, which are known for being even softer. We wanted this movie to look timeless with an anytown/anywhere feel -- so this idea drove all our design and photographic decisions. I spent a lot of time with Patrick Neary (DP) and Ryan Malmberg (PD) collaborating on the look/style so we could all bring our best ideas and be in sync. Basically, our goal was always to have a stylized looking film but without sacrificing organic performances and potential surprises. Also, we were moving so fast that we had to be intentional in terms of knowing exactly what we wanted in pre-production.

How have you seen your craft as a filmmaker change from the shorts ‘Wow and Flutter” and “People Die” to the full length “Calvin Marshall?” What did you concern yourself with then that you no longer even think about now?

I'm always drawn to character and tone first - that's the easy part for me. The hardest part about filmmaking in general though is telling a compelling story that an audience will want to follow and invest in emotionally. The next few films I hope to direct have more of an emphasis on plot, which I'm really looking forward to. One thing I learned on “Calvin” was that the mechanics of shooting the film, even with more money and a famous cast, are exactly the same as the smaller films I've made over the years. That was a big surprise to me. I guess I thought it would be a much different experience, so you go into it expecting it to be easier or more fun or just different...but then you find yourself in the same trenches, doing essentially the exact same job. And you still have to make the same 10,000 decisions in just a few weeks. So, knowing this now, I really can't wait to get back out there and make another feature. I feel like I'm so prepared to attack the filmmaking process because I know exactly what to expect every step of the way.

Both “Wow and Flutter” and “Calvin” have at their core male characters diligently choosing to go against the odds and opposition to do what they know is right, in their various context. Is this autobiographical or what is it that attracts you to write these characters?

Again, I like complex characters because that's how human beings really are life. To me, the world isn't black and white -- it's almost all gray. As far as Calvin and David, they aren't autobiographical, but they definitely possess aspects of myself. I love baseball and I've always been a music freak so I can understand their desires. And becoming a filmmaker over the years has been such a difficult road with so many sacrifices, that I'd like to think I've taken risks in similar ways. Also, I've always been drawn to unique people/personalities. You could see both Calvin and David as misfits I suppose, but I see them as heroic, completely unique individuals, both willing to take risks. Even if it makes them look like fools.

Music plays an important role in your films, choreographing the scenes throughout “Calvin Marshall.” How do you see music as part of the storytelling?

Music is critical to the entire process for me. While I'm writing a script, I gradually fill up a playlist with hundreds of songs. And then, while re-writing I trim the playlist back down to a few hours of music. Usually a few songs will make it into the script. Sound and music is half of the art of filmmaking. If you watch/listen to our BLURAY with a good 5.1 sound system, you'll be able to hear all the little nuances we worked so hard to get right. Background conversations, SFX, the evolving score. Layers and layers of sound (and John Askew's score) were mixed very carefully on a great sound stage with my friend David Raines, someone who will probably win an Oscar someday. It was so amazing for me to go through that mixing process because, again, I now know what's possible for the next film.

The project I'm writing now (BAD VINTAGE) will probably be 95% original score in the end, but I still have a mostly instrumental playlist building that's informing the tone/mood of the story. We're going to put a lot of effort in the sound design on the next one. Our goal is that it will be difficult to pinpoint exactly where the sound design ends and the score begins. They will be developed together even as we're preparing to shot.

How do you see filmmaking as an art form? What is it particular to the medium of film that attracts you?

For me, storytelling is the greatest art form. Seeing my daughter experience stories as a toddler has been stunning to me. It's such an innate need human beings have. We all need stories because they're a mirror for our own struggles, conflicts, hopes and dreams. I was an English major in college so I love the classics but I also love popular fiction. Comic books, graphic novels, great stories of all kinds.

And visual storytelling is my favorite. All the tools filmmakers have at their fingertips to tell their stories is very attractive. Cinematography, sound design, music, characterizations, dialogue, subtext...the best filmmakers use each tool effectively, and I love the challenge of trying to do this. It's not easy, but it's so much fun.

I think human beings are miracles and not some sort of cosmic accident. Every person out there is a miracle and their hopes/dreams/aspirations matter in the universe. The fact Calvin wants to play baseball and can't is heart wrenching to me. I hope that people will be emotionally moved by the characters and stories I'm involved with and that in some small way they will make people's lives a little bit fuller. I, also, hope that my films will have a long shelf life and are re-watchable. We all know and love those films that are more consumable and we only watch once. But I hope to make the kind of movies that are hard to turn off because the characters in them feel like old friends and we want to see once again how their conflicts and lives turn out.

Hal Holbrook recently said that the reason he continues to act in small, independent films is that they are where the real stories are told, where the characters have more humanity than the impossible blockbuster movies of the big studios (paraphrase). What are your thoughts about this, being a writer/director of the very films he is talking about?

I couldn't agree more. When there's less money being spent, there's a lot more freedom to flesh out rich characters. As that budget climbs though, you generally get more black and white, archetypal characters. And the themes can't be too complex either because the movies have to appeal to more people so they have a chance of making money. But, with all fairness, there are still many filmmakers out there (and companies) who have made important, big budget movies with characters that have humanity. Pixar films to me are high art. And don't get me started on some of the great directors who have walked that line and managed to get big budget works of art produced.

What’s next? Are there more stories to be told through the eyes of Gary Lundgren?

We're pushing hard to make a film called BAD VINTAGE. It's a supernatural horror film turned on its ear. I guess it falls somewhere between Flannery O'Connor and something kind of like Rosemary's Baby. The story has a lot of great characters I love who find themselves in a pretty grim situation one bad night at a winery in Napa Valley.

I'm attached to direct a film called Easy Way that's based on Christopher E. Long's graphic novel. It has some great characters and tackles severe drug addiction in a compassionate, entertaining way. I'm hoping that will get off the ground.

I, also, have this comedy called “Beach Freaks” that I wrote with Diedrich Bader in mind. This one has another ensemble of interesting characters I like but it's more plot driven and the comedy gets pretty ridiculous. I'm not sure quite what to make of it yet, but I know I like it. And Diedrich's such a hilarious guy that I hope it works out down the road.

You’ve been doing a long road of hard work to get the word out about “Calvin Marshall,” and now “Calvin” opened in New York at the Quad on August 20th and starts a run in Portland at THe Living Room. Is this a kind of landmark for the film? What would you like to see happen during this time in NYC and Portland?

We're very lucky for the theatrical runs we've had and it's very cool to finish in New York and Portland. Any national press we get and a NY release kind of validates the movie in people's eyes. Perception is still important. Straight to Video still seems to have bad connotations for consumers. Of course, I wish we had a much wider release with tons of P&A, but the independent film world is changing so fast, that it wouldn't make a lot of business sense. But, I still feel like movies should be experienced in communities at the local movie theater. I hope that doesn't go away for indies, but it might.

Opening in New York felt good for all of us involved because we've been down such a long winding road to get here. I hope we continue getting a nice critical response. So far the reviews have been great. Most of all, I hope NY and Portland gives us a little boost going into our DVD/VOD release in September. The ancillary markets is where “Calvin Marshall” will live on for years so hopefully it will gradually gain a fan base over time.

The movie will be everywhere: iTunes, Amazon VOD, Direct TV VOD, Netflix, Cable VOD, Kiosks. We are also selling limited edition Blu-ray bundles right from our website. This will be the only place you can get a physical copy of our soundtrack, signed posters, T-Shirts, swag, etc.

“Calvin Marshall” will be at the Living Room Theaters in Portland, Oregon on August 27th for a full week.

Being Here on Time

2010-08-10T13:41:00.001-06:00

Time at the Speed of Light - Day 138
Originally uploaded by iamkr

As a musician there are days where I can pick up my guitar or mandolin and be spot on, never miss a beat, and every song plays like it was the best. I know it when I am in that place but I could hardly tell you how I got there. The timing came; it wasn’t something I made happen.

There are times when I tie on my running shoes, hit trails or pavement and find a rhythm that is so perfect I could run like Forrest, days on days. This happened recently on an 8 miler. I finished running and saw that over an hour had gone by and it felt like I had just left without a drop of weariness to be found. But I certainly didn’t plan it that way.

Twice in one day I heard from two elder men that life is more about timing than about making things happen. They also talked of how being present today is the only way to be there when the timing is right. These were two very different men in two different contexts, in the backside of long, adventurous lives. (And our culture dismisses these treasures of wisdom as out of touch).

So if I listen to my music, and the rhythm of my running. If I give heed to the wisdom of these Village Elders then it seems the place I need to spend my energy is in the here and now. I say this like it is some kind of profound revelation. Considering how much talk goes on amongst the under 40 crowd about making things happen, though, maybe the young should listen, pay attention to the rhythm of the old.

Transition

2010-08-02T17:42:00.003-06:00

Transition, originally uploaded by iamkr.

Places of transition have a certain gravitational pull for me. I find terminals as intriguing as an art museum or sporting event might be for others. Airplane. Bus. Train. These are the tangible liminal spaces of our culture. People enter these places, stepping out of one realm on their way to another and are, for minutes, or hours in a transitional space – neither the place they left or arrived to the place they are going.

A few years ago I had a job that required me to fly quite a bit, and so I spent significant amounts of time in Terminal Space. I saw the wonder and awe at the size of airplanes and flight itself through the eyes of children or hear two strangers have an unexpected conversation about their families; there is a the quintessential cowboy – hat, boots, an snap shirt – reading a copy of the Times or the first-time mom with time and space to do nothing but delight in her daughter. From the moment I enter an airport I am always looking around at the people around me, watching how they carry themselves in this place that isn’t a destination. People-watching might be the best hidden secret to travel. Where else in our world do all ages, genders, sizes, shapes, histories gather in one place in such an unplanned yet choreographed manner?

Then there’s a train station - be it as big and kinetic as Grand Central or empty and sleepy as Denver’s Union - they have a different kind of liminal space. Maybe it is because the people passing through know they are getting nowhere fast and so there are more naps, more books being read, more staring into space. Even the buildings have the smell of worn, aged oak and over a century of polish and oils wafting through the air. You can still grab the scent of cigarette smoke from the thousands of butts that burned for decades before health codes shut them out. Train Terminals carry ghost of travelers past, aged like some precious whiskey, lingering. Even an empty station has a life and warmth that must be from all the stories on their way to being told.

I once sat in Grand Central’s main lobby for close to an hour as I waited to meet someone. I moved to a wall on the edge and sat down and listened and looked. There I heard the accents of so many immigrants now called New Yorkers, the lingo of two Transit Authority workers bantering about such and such train, the clipping and clapping of all those hard-soled shoes and pumps across marble. I saw smiles and blankness, and preoccupation and fear. Goodbyes and hellos and plans for the evening. All happening in a space between the places they wanted to be.

In contrast, I have done a few photo walk-abouts in Denver’s Union Station both in the middle of the night and the day. The nighttime Union is lit from another era and accents the aged woods as if in some period-piece film, sepia and glowing. Strange enough that so many trains leave in the dead of night as I saw more people about the station near midnight than I did in the day. But they still moved slow and sleepy, as if they were already sitting in their seats on that long, diesel train to somewhere. The space is liminal still, but with a since of time passed, the slow-lane into somewhere else.

Unfortunately, many people simply complain and gripe when they are stuck in these liminal, transitional spaces longer than they expected; as if to complain is going do anything but make the time in such space less tolerable. They miss the beautiful moments, and maybe a serendipitous conversation they could have experienced with another traveler. To be preoccupied with what’s not happening in such a space as this is to lose out on the gracious reminder of how little we actually control.

And how much more these truths - the delights and missed moments - are played out in the liminal and transitional terminals of the soul….

A Kindling's Reflections

2010-07-24T15:31:00.005-06:00

Ice Blue Channel, originally uploaded by iamkr.

I was on an island near the coast of Washington for about a week with a rather diverse gathering of artist, writers, theologians, philosophers, poets, film makers, and quite simply, rich individuals as part of The Kindlings. I wasn’t sure when I started the trip why I was making this journey and once on Orcas Island, I still wasn’t exactly clear, but my gut knew something worthwhile was taking place.

The full green beauty of the place alone would make the trip a win, but the conversations and movements around an open-handed exploration of friendship and its catalytic nature in culture, the arts, and Life took the word “beauty” to a different level.

Elaine Scarry says, “The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental events of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction – to locate what is true.” In this time on Orcas, I experienced Beautiful as something that wasn’t seen with the eyes but churned underground rivers in me; it brought me to a place of admitting my errors, of hiding too much, and that in my friendships, in my living, in each creative act I do I desire something more, like beauty.

That is the best summary I can give of the week. Even so, as I was flying back from Seattle I read the end of “Flight to Arras” by Antoine Saint-Exuperey and in its last pages he writes: “My eyes have been unsealed, and I want now to remember what it is that they have seen.” Here is what I wrote in my own remembering what of I have seen and heard…

- A community, a gathering of artists and creatives can form an encouraging space to explore numerous levels of friendship, creativity, calling.

- I want more Nigel Goodwins in my life - men who are openly themselves, open-armed, and constantly exploring, reshaping the edges and depths of what it is to be loved, human, free, alive.

- What it is to listen AND speak…it’s ok to be quiet, but don’t hold back either.

- Not to fear when there are deeper waters churned even if they can’t be easily seen or defined for they might be movements of who God made us to be awakening

- The Creator’s voice is never condemning or shaming, so if I hear this, it’s not his.

- To ask: “Who are the friends with a long-suffering history? ” Because they are worth whatever it takes.

- I am wooed to higher standards, higher creative moves

- To “chew on it, chew on it some more, and again, chew on it again.” - N. Goodwin

- Sometimes it takes a shadow of something bigger to get me out of the sandbox and run to shelter; that maybe a bomb in the sandbox needs to happen once in awhile (even if it isn’t intended for good) to move us out into the world.

- I can’t hide anymore, even if I’m unsure of where we are going in the daylight

- Vulnerability and intimacy are not the same thing, but one can lead to the other.

And like Nigel said, I will be chewing on all this and more for weeks if not months to come…

On Wendell Berry

2010-07-23T22:39:00.001-06:00

Warp Drive - Day 167, originally uploaded by iamkr.

An article I wrote called The Long View was published recently over at Curator Magazine. It was based on these words from Wendell Berry:

People are joined to the land by work. Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information – so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers – because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious - that a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive.

Go give it a read: HERE

Travel Motionless

2010-07-16T16:17:00.001-06:00

Seattle - Day 165, originally uploaded by iamkr.

“It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere….What are we worth when motionless, is the question.” – From “Flight to Arras” by Saint-Exuperey

There is irony in the context I read these words. It was during a 24 hour, marathon travel day that had me flying from Denver to Las Vegas to Oakland to Seattle, and finally on an eight-seat puddle jumper across the San Juan Islands to Eastsound in Orcas Island. It was a space of time that would seem anything but motionless and appear to be all kinds of escape over absurd distances. But when you are merely a passenger, there is vey little actual personal movement involved. You sit. In an exit row. At a gate. On a shuttle.

In this case, I read quite a bit while sitting, or simply pondered and watched. I read about Saint-Exuperey’s potentially doomed “Flight to Arras” - a recon mission he flew in the last ditch efforts of French resistance to the bulwark German Army in World War II. He left his airfield on a flight that had a 1 in 3 chance of returning alive, if at all. And of course he survived, because, well, he wrote the book.

He answers his own question, “What are we worth when motionless?” with this:
“There is a density of being in a Dominican at prayer. He is never so much alive as when prostate and motionless before his God. In Pasteur, holding his breath over the microscope, there is a density of being. Pasteur is never more alive than in that moment of scrutiny. He is advancing in seven-league boots, exploring distances despite his immobility. Cezanne, mute and motionless before his sketch, is an inestimable presence. He is never more alive than when silent, when feeling and pondering.”

I had enough chaos in the travel that I could easily have missed the spaces to sit “mute and motionless,” and I almost did. One of those moments was on my last flight for the night to Oakland, on the taxi and take off. Regardless of the typical FAA regulations I had my earphones in and on, listening to Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto #1 in C, Largo.” There was this coming together of sight and sound, a choreography of the music with the passing of runway lights, the crescendos in sync with the engine’s roar as the wheels left the ground. In it all something inside my skin, in the thump of my heart heard and saw something unspeakable and beautiful. The agitations melted to a peaceful hand on the shoulder of my spirit. The music reminded me that God is in the creative work of making order out of chaos – and the day had been chaotic. Mako Fujimura’s words came to mind:
“What would our art look like if we truly believed that through our weaknesses, through even what we are ashamed of, we could create something that is lasting and meaningful, and incarnate hope back into the world?”

In a motionless moment of travel, the art that Beethoven created hundreds of years ago and the art of lights and passive movement unintentionally created by the airline industry hope was incarnated back into the world around me.

This was preparation for what was to come. For the following morning, after a crack-of-dawn flight to Seattle from Oakland, I climbed into a small, single engine plane at Boeing field – feeling very much like a little boy again for all the various planes and Wow of flight and giddiness sparked within me – and flew over the San Juan Islands on a sheer blue day to Orcas Island. It was the beginning of a rich and full day that plucked strings in some deep part of me that hasn’t heard music since the day I was born….

Catching Breath

2010-07-09T11:22:00.001-06:00

Beautiful End - Day 145, originally uploaded by iamkr.

“…He began to hear an echo of a greater redemptive grace…He began to breathe in trust and dared to create again.” - Mako Fujimura on William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops.

Breathing in trust and daring to create again.

I am still rather weary, in numerous ways, from the work I was doing in Texas. And in these few days between travels (heading to Orcas Island, WA soon) I am learning to breathe again. As I wrote earlier today, “You are giving me air, if only I would breathe…”

In House...

2010-07-05T10:37:00.006-06:00

House M.D.
Originally uploaded by Wojciech Scrat

During a six-week stint as medic for a camp outside of Austin, TX, I acquired a nickname: “House” – as in Dr. Gregory House, M.D. I’d like to think it was because of my brilliant diagnostic skills that routinely were tried at one o’clock in the morning after I’d been asleep for an hour, or that I was always right in the end, *wink. But I think it was more due to my ever increasing grizzled spirit that seemed to grow in proportion to the decrease in sleep… mostly from those wake-up calls at one o’clock in the morning. I often would introduce myself to the new batch of leaders by saying, “I’m not a doctor, but I resemble one played on TV.”

House tends to be a modern day Sherlock Holmes, constantly faced with tough diagnosis that stump everyone except him in the end, usually resolved by epiphanal “a-ha” in which some obscure connection explains the patient’s disease. House is also one mean, harsh, dry-witted, dark, disturbed character. He unabashedly tells the truth, almost out of spite. He’s a nihilist and a recovering addict with a severe wound that causes not only his limp but is the source of all his bitter rants and his addiction to Vicodin.

I recently watched the season finale of “House” - partly out of curiosity to see how much my nickname might be true, and partly because it was all filmed on a Canon 5D camera and looks amazing. In the finale, he is on-site of a catastrophic disaster, finds a woman trapped in the rubble and is forced to step outside of his usual hard-shelled, gruff self and be more human, more compassionate. At the same time, House is dealing with the fact that his romantic interest, Cuddy, is getting married to someone else. (SPOILER ALERT). After doing everything right to save the woman trapped in the rubble, she still dies… and he can’t make sense of any of it – been there before. It sends him into a downward spiral, topped by the fact that his hard-heartedness has shut-out the one woman he cares about. He’s a battered, crumpled mess in his bathroom getting ready to start using the Vicodin again, to kill the pain – not just in his leg – when Cuddy walks in and tells him she loves him. He says, “Do you think I can fix myself?... Because I’m the most screwed up person in the world.” Cuddy responds, “I know…I love you.”

My nickname was given as a joke. And even one of the guys I worked with said to me at the end of our time, “I know we call you House and all, but you aren’t. He’s a dick." Yet, for all the hullabaloo, I can see my self in the character. He’s smart enough to know what’s killing his heart and often times doesn’t engage it, doesn’t deal. He’s dying for human connection and yet finds it easier to live in the shallows, playing superior and isolationists. I’ve done all these things. We all end up on the bathroom floor sooner or later...

But, we change…. Or we die. And my gruffness with people over the last few weeks was nothing more than façade, painted by weariness. Regardless of my fatigue, when it came to caring for patients - a seemingly 25/7 never ending job – I listened and did my best to figure out what was going on, reassuring them that it wasn’t the end of the world.

I used to think I was “the most screwed up person in the world,” and the evidence to support such belief was epic. I may still have my edges that could use softening and wearing down – and they both come to light and melt as I live in, interact with others in community. My wounds shaped and defined me for too long, and I am still in the process of becoming the person I was made to be… and that person is so much larger and more alive than the wounded, crumpled soul on the bathroom floor. Our wounds might be as real the limp in House's leg, but there is more to walking than maintaining the limp. We get to run, and I am constantly being beckoned by graciousness and freedom to get out run further up, further in.

I am not a doctor, nor even the resemblance of one played on TV. But it sure makes for some comedic moments and humbling reality checks to see the similarities come to light…

To Reteach a Girl Her Loveliness

2010-06-23T20:56:00.001-06:00

“The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
or everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within” - Galway Kinnel

I have been inundated with babies. Over 100 of them to be exact. These babies are White, Latino, Black, fatherless, a few months old to a year or two, loud and crying, soft and shaped with eyes of wonder. These babies have mothers, too. And their mother’s? Well, most of them are barely old enough to drive a car, much less vote. Some are as young as fourteen. Some of these mom’s could easily be my daughter, and their children my grandchildren – which is about as strange a consideration as I can imagine.

These are the women, the girls that make up the numbers to politician’s statistical rants for or against abortion, poverty, low-income education flaws, or the failings of America. These are the girls who are fodder for cocktail conversations about social injustices and deteriorating culture. These are girls who are pitied with statements such as “isn’t that a shame?”

I can say all this because I am one of the guilty. I have subtly boxed off this whole population with pity, dismissal, and, at my worst, callousness. And to some degree it was still easy to hold such a position when these women first stepped off their buses and cars for a week in the Texas Hill Country. They had armor on. They had the look of distrust. They carried in their eyes the defeat and sense of dismissal that they had seen in too many faces. They had forgotten their loveliness. That was day one.

As the week went on, as each girl was treated with respect, had doors opened for them, were cared for, and loved on by mentors, or a babysitter, or even one of the few guys around that served their meals… things cracked. The armor started to fade. Perspectives changed. Their Creator seeped through those cracks with words and wooings about how they are really seen, who they are before all this ever happened. They became girls – girls with children, but girls all the same.

And in my eyes I saw yet another human trying to become more the person they suspect might be, I saw women become girls. They shared their joys in being mothers. Over and over I heard them say they do not regret having their child, only that they wished they had waited longer.

”to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely”

By week’s end, at the last dinner, each one of these girls dressed up in their best, and they seemed to walk with wings. They were smiling even when they weren’t, they were alive and laughed…. not the laughter that is hiding tears, but real, deep, joy laughter. And most seemed to be comfortable in their skin, as if they were trying it on for the first time.

"...until it flowers again from within”

No Longer Afraid We May Succeed

2010-06-13T07:56:00.002-06:00

You Are Beautiful
Originally uploaded by iamkr

Birthday’s are spaces of reflection and forward movement for me, increasingly so. Today started in sipping contemplative with a cup of coffee and the last lines of the movie ”Finding Forrester”: ”We walk away from our dreams afraid we may fail, or worse yet, afraid we may succeed.” Words written, spoken at the end of a life.

I could easily say that for a chunk of my life I’ve walked away afraid I may fail, and afraid more so of succeeding… afraid of what success in dreams could do to my life. But I would guess that fear came about because I didn’t trust the Source of those dreams, nor what he says about my heart and the worth of my dreams. I am still learning, discovering what dreams were dreamed in me at my conception, what Love created within me.

At thirty-seven I hope that I am less afraid of success in those dreams, that I am stepping more and more into who I was made to be. I am just starting to live… and I feel I say that every year. Maybe it will be that when I am old and dying, when the air in my lungs is used up and the number of beats allotted my heart comes to an end, I will discover I am only starting to live…

Shining up the Old Places

2010-06-05T16:31:00.003-06:00

For the past few years I find myself in familiar settings, circumstances or spaces of life – moments that I’ve encountered before or that are so similar as to rouse memories like aromatic waves across time. In these spaces, these moments it is as if the Choreographer intentionally sets the scene walking me through the door and then waits to see what I will do.

Will I repeat my lines, performing the same way I did the last time I was here? Will I only see the stage set from the same narrow eyes that encountered it before or will I see a different story, say new lines never said before from a posture completely other than the last time?

Surrendering judgment seems integral to the play. Not so much surrendering discernment – for that is a fool’s way. It’s more about letting go of the conclusions I carry through the door.
While working in the Texas Hill Country outside of that oasis known as Austin for the next month, I am having quite a few of these forays into moments past. I am just up the highway from a camp I attended one summer in grade school. The two to three weeks there were quite miserable, not so much because I was homesick, but because the camp was something like three weeks of Rush for some nebulous future fraternity I had no intentions of joining. Socialites 101 for Pre-teens. Add to it that it was during the cusp of my parent’s divorce, and you have a boy full of insecurities and awkward searching for a place in the world.

Being back in the area, seeing familiar landscape and smelling the mesquite, hearing the crickets sparks memories from those darker days. It was as if I re-entered this space on the stage, ready to assume that this too would be a bad experience.

But then I stopped.

Before letting those memories take over, and mark the landscape, I felt the tap on the shoulder from Life that asks, “What if this time it is different? What if your conclusions then were wrong, and what if there is a different way of seeing this place? What if you could shine in your skin this time because you were meant to shine then, too, only you had no One to take your hand, showing you how?”

Could it be that Life wants freedom for us more than we want to be free? It is far easier to hold to conclusions made about a story I had all wrong the first time around than to release my grip and hear again the true Story being told. A good story, a good book is one that can be read over and over while new discoveries are found with each reading. And sometimes I have to correct my understanding of a moment at the beginning of the story to really see the depth and greatness of the later chapters.

Entering familiar space only to find I am not who I thought I was, to find I am someone new is like waking each day to a new world… and isn’t that Ultimate Reality after all?

“It is Love who makes the mortar, and it's Love who stacked these stones, and it's Love who made the stage here although it looks like we're alone. In this scene set in shadows like the night is here to stay there is evil cast around us, but it's Love that wrote the play... ” - David Wilcox 

The Bear Inside of Me

2010-05-31T20:36:00.004-06:00

Blue Bear at Denver Convention Center
Originally uploaded by Raul Cortijo

I spent an evening inside a Blue Bear.

I didn’t give it much thought. It was too strange not to. I am not an actor or have any background in performance art. I hardly knew what to do once inside the suit and cartoonish blue bear head, because I was no longer me. I was a Blue Bear. And Bears don’t talk. Even Blue ones. They Growl occasionally, and I did.

In Denver there is a giant Blue Bear sculpture staring into the performing arts center. It wasn’t that Blue Bear. It was a human sized version of it, though. 15 Minutes was putting on POP-UP Market for Create Denver Week and throughNemo I heard they were needing someone to dress up in a blue bear costume for a few hours. In a moment of playful-spirited spontaneity I said, “Oh, that’s sounds strange enough to be fun. I’m in.” All the while thinking I might be crossing over some line into true nutcase to volunteer.

So after a hiccup with my Mac at the Apple Genius Bar, I raced over to 16th and Glenarm to don the Bear Suit. Turns out the Denver Cupcake Truck was making its debut – selling cupcakes as part of the art opening. Once in the Blue Bear outfit I wasn’t really able to talk, nor supposed to.

I was now a performance artist, using my arms and legs, my body as a means of expressing emotion or communicating with anyone. Sounds simple enough, but have you ever considered what it is to express, to “talk” when you can’t, and when you aren’t sure how you are perceived? Most of us at least have an image of what we look like to others, if not the image we see in a mirror. Having never seen myself as a Blue Bear this was a luxury that I did not share. I was constantly imagining what I looked like or how certain moves appeared to others. Talk about getting out of your own skin.

There’s, also, an interesting thing that happens with complete strangers when you are a Blue Bear. People interact with an affection akin to being around a giant puppy dog, petting or wanting to snuggle up for a hug and a picture. There were others that were downright afraid of me, as they might be of a clown. They would get the willies and run away or be on constant guard whenever I was I in view.

Being a Blue Bear, above anything, gave me the opportunity to listen. Since I could not talk, and I was not me, I was some kind of silent cartoon that people would say anything around or even to. Imagine going to a cocktail party for four hours and never saying a word, only listening. That’s a bit of what it was like for me that night. I could hear the animation in a person’s voice that I would normally miss as I was preoccupied with what I might say in response. I could stand in a room and be a fly – or a giant blue bear - on the wall to numerous exchanges between friends, strangers, artists, tourists, you name it. And every once in awhile someone would come over and ask if they could have their picture taken with me. Only it wasn’t me they were asking. It was the Blue Bear.

Eventually things quieted down and I was done being a bear. I went into a room, changed out of the outfit and was me again. They never knew how much I heard, how much I saw behind those bear eyes. I was a new stranger to them. Nobody noticed the man from the bear suit as he grabbed his bag, and walked out the door into the city streets, eating a cupcake from his night’s work….

“Me I just bear up to my bewildered best
And some folks even see the bear in me
So meet a bear and take him out to lunch with you
And even though your friends may stop and stare
Just remember that's a bear there having lunch with you
And they just don't come no better than a bear…” - “Bears”

Seeing in Nowhere

2010-05-26T13:56:00.003-06:00

For visions come not to polluted eyes.
Originally uploaded by Muhammad Fahad Raza | Away till end May 2010 |

Driving through the Panhandle of Texas is always a playground for the imagination. That might be due to the lack of contours south of Amarillo or that there is so much Old West history about this area stored in my head. When I am not imagining what it was like to ride a horse or heard cattle and not get killed, there really isn’t much outright captivating about the drive. Except, this time, I was seeing everything around me through the camera lens, looking for a shot to be had, hiding in plain sight. Being a photographer has challenged me with a hopeful seeing and searching for beauty even in what appears to be the most mundane places. And West Texas can be pretty mundane.

For instance, the sky in West Texas is so much wider and further away than it is Colorado. Though CO has plenty of amazing vertical to look at, the flatness or drop in altitude seems to make the Texas sky feel like a transition from a movie theater to a planetarium in visual mass alone.

Both of these pictures were taken while still driving through this very expanse on my way to Lubbock. (Like I said, it’s pretty broad and flat and not hard to drive):

The following day, I was finishing up the trip to Austin. Between Lubbock and Austin, it used to be masses of farmland. Then someone decided that since the wind seems to never take a rest in these parts, that one might as well turn that wind into energy. Now, there are Wind Farms for over a hundred miles of the drive. Though I’ve seen these giant turbines in numerous places, something about their layout in this area of Texas gave the feeling of driving through some giant giraffe playground. I could see why Don Quixote thought a windmill was a giant to be slain.

I almost expected these beasts to move slow-like across the road, stepping in that measured lazy motion of an elephant. I was enamored for hours.

But I didn’t used to see this landscape through such eyes of wonder. The numerous other times I’ve made this drive I gripped and groaned through the presumed monotony. I would stop for fuel and see my prejudiced, critical spirit rise up as I heard the thick accent and fractured grammar coming from a manure-stained, cut-off t-shirt wearing local in a dust-covered Co-Op hat telling the equally small-town, mousey girl at the register some story about his hot-rod or such. I would see characters and not another human being with a story; who has worked hard, and does every day; that longs not so much for a vacation in the Bahamas as just a moment of rest for calloused hands, or from the banks. I would think to myself, “How does anyone live out here in such desolation???”

It was a new way of seeing and hearing old roads, this time around. The seeing seems to have its spark through the lenses of the different cameras I carry with me these days. The hearing came about though the grace of books like Wendell Berry’s that remind me “What People Are For,” and attempts to listen more than speak – even if it is only speaking in my own head at the time.

There is a whole world out there, even in the dull places, if we are willing to let our eyes wonder and listen to our imaginations. Nobody is just a someone, a farmer, a trucker, a barista. Nowhere isn’t a place full of emptiness, but is drenched in possibility.

My First White Friend

2010-05-22T11:59:00.002-06:00

Charcoal four - day 59
Originally uploaded by iamkr

My First White Friend by Patricia Raybon is quite possibly one of the most honest, candid stories of a black woman admitting her hate for white folks, navigating the sources of this hate and moving from that personal toxicity to an internal forgiveness and freedom. Mrs. Raybon was a professor at the University of Colorado and though I never took a class from her when I was a student there, I’m wishing I did.

Contrary to our current popular opinion, having a black president hasn’t solved the race issue in America. It might have only converted vocal javelins into subtle barbs whispered under bitter breaths. Yet, my guess, as a white guy, is that most white folks don’t really know how to navigate the Race waters without being defensive or apologetic or a mixture of both. Raybon’s book is a good start. Here are some snippets:

“The hate doesn’t fix anything. It might feel good to hate – and sometimes it does. Sometimes hate is sweet juice, stuff to get drunk on. But in the morning there’s that headache, and that churning mess in the stomach. So a remedy has to go deep. Deep like redemption. Or like Hope. Or Like Forgiveness.” – p. 9

“I must work, indeed, on my race hate…it isn’t easy, because forgiving the racial past means, first, acknowledge that it happened, and that means reviving old horrors. Nobody wants to do that… but you can’t forgive something you haven’t struggled with, toiled over, walked on, slept with – and race is a bad bed partner…
But I must try, knowing that like a bad penny the bad feelings and mean easy will rise and rise again. But now I can pray. I can hope and I will believe that I can overcome. There’s just nothing else.” P. 227

“Quietly I hated, with a silence that too many us hide behind nice smiles – that expression of oppression. That grin of powerlessness.”p. 5

“It starts on the inside.
I didn’t see that for years – believing instead that power, in the form of the approval of others, came from a place outside of me. I handed over my power, in fact, to others – white folks especially. Tell me I’m OK. Befriend me, hire me, admire me, give me a good table at your restaurant, sell me a house in you neighborhood, talk to me, listen to me, look at me, love me.

But white people can’t satisfy all these needs - because nobody externally can possibly fill up somebody else’s internal longings. That inability, of white folks to satisfy my emotional needs, has been part of my disappointment with white people. I have them, indeed, for not filling me up… hate soon consumes itself, because hate eats up oxygen and other life-giving properties.” p.113

“I realize, finally, that God never expected me to be perfect. Man did. And woman. And white folks. And black folks. The world did. But all the while, the Lord was saying, ‘Child, you’re OK with me. Being perfect is My business. Being is yours.’” p.134

“…as Mandela so wisely put it: ‘What has happened has happened.’ That was then. And now is now. And Emmett Till and Megdar Evers and Martin and Malcolm and the four little girls in the Birmingham church want us to move on. The honor the sacrifice of their lives and make it a gain…White folks and black folks alike are indebted, and we must bury our paralyzing anxieties about race – worries that somebody else is getting ahead faster, or that somebody’s racial sin demands somebody else’s heated revenge. It’s time, instead, to start living up to our collective and individual potential as a blessed human community. We must start making connections, not just by race or age or gender or in other affiliate ways, but by linking our talents and energy, our resources, our ideas, our hopes – so we can finally, blessedly, banish our fears. Indeed, we must start loving so we can start living. And the past? It is over.” p.137

Notes from Impermanence

2010-05-10T17:40:00.001-06:00

Young Republic 15th - Day 74
Originally uploaded by iamkr

The latest collection of words to pluck a note in those deeper places inside my soul:
“It is difficult to accept that all my beloved communities are going to die, and that even while they exist there are incredible spaces between human beings, even the closest. And, despite all my urgings toward community, I will always be, like Abraham, a wanderer, far from home. But the people who are most aware of their own impermanence are the most able to throw wide open the doors of heart and hearth to the stranger, to hear his message, receive his blessing.” - L’Engle

More than ever I am aware of my own impermanence, lately. And as it soaks in I do find, also, that I am more and more able to throw wide open the doors of heart,(and well I don’t have a hearth right now but if did…), to the stranger; not just meeting new people, but wanting to hear their story, to connect and be more than strangers – to receive their message, their blessing while hopefully sharing my own message and blessings.

This wouldn’t have happened if I stayed comfortably in my own idea of safety and security and stability. It’s not to say I don’t find my hands grasping to hold on even to these new friendships. But it seems that entering into these “incredible spaces between human beings” is something like playing music together – we each have our part to play to make something beautiful and that can only come as we listen to the music being made, holding loosely our ideas of what it should sound like.

Prickled To Laughter

2010-05-08T10:07:00.003-06:00

CACTUS PATCH
Originally uploaded by dig dave

I was back-walking some hose when I tripped behind me and fell. I landed in a rather inconvenient patch of cactus. Cheeks first. The guys I worked with all stopped what they were doing, as if we were all men in a prison shower and some just dropped the soap. We all knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. But I, well, I was laughing to myself as the rest of my body registered the burning pain of hundreds of tiny needles cutting through my jeans and into my arse. And I could hear in my head, ”Damn you, Spike.”

For some reason when I think of cactus I picture Snoopy’s brother, Spike, from the desolate California town of Needles– his scruffy whiskers and the name “Needles” says it all. Plus, every time you see Spike, he is walking among tall cacti in the desert. So, goes my first memory association with the word and spines of a cactus patch.

Most people fall into a cactus patch and think “Ouch!” I fall into one and think, “Snoopy’s brother.”

After gingerly standing myself up from the patch, and hearing each of the guys around me ooh and whoa at the numerous points sticking out of my pants, I limped to the truck to remove what I could. Soon, I was standing with my pants down, picking out tiny needle after tiny needle from my left cheek. But I couldn’t get to some of them. There were bigger spines stuck deeper than others.

Enter my long time friend Mark. Mark and I go back almost twenty years. In college my buddy Tad – who is now a Russian Orthodox Priest, 1st of the left HERE - and I would drive down from Boulder to Buena Vista for the weekend to help Mark build his beautiful log home by hand. They were good times of a days work in Rocky Mountains as Fall blew in from the North.

I guess you get to be comfortable with another man after those many years. And so, Mark was the one crouched down to eye level with my exposed buttocks, tweezers in hand, pulling out spine needle after spine needle. It took some awkward maneuvering to find the deepest one. When he finally got it out he exclaimed, “Whooeee! No wonder that hurt. Look at that! Must have been a quarter-inch deep.”

From there he left me to my own while the other guys finished up work. I crawled into the truck, pantless and picked the remaining cagillion cactus bits out of my pants… laughing at the absurdity of the whole event.

Driving back to the office – me in my underwear – they made joke after joke about my situation. ”Hope the cops don’t pull you over on the drive home. Try explaining driving in only your underwear.” Unknown to them I had red flowered surf trunks in the back of my car and so would only look half as ridiculous as that. So there.

I made my way home – looking more like I was heading to the beach than in the mountains – and sitting half-tilted in the driver’s seat thinking about Snoopy’s brother and what a laughable space I occupy in life. There is no room for taking myself seriously.

Getting Intimate with Truth

2010-05-06T16:42:00.003-06:00

wine and bread - day 61
Originally uploaded by iamkr

Earlier this week I was in a dialogue with Jason Markow about a post he wrote called, ”You are What you FEED.” We were talking about how everybody, EVERY ONE has a perspective that is shaped by their story, the stuff that’s made them and shaped their view. I am currently working with a group of guys that during the course of a day we chat about current events, the Afghan War, the President, the environment, etc. Some of the things I hear make me cringe for what sounds like such absurd opinions, or perspective. Sometimes I have to remind myself that any one of these guys is not the sum of their perspective. They are more, so much more. We can lose out when we only engage each other in reactions to a point of view.

But ultimately that means that any point of view is just that - a Point of view. And I hear Madeline L’Engle’s words, “We have a point of view. God has view.” Points of View might be what we like to call “your truth” or “my truth. What if there is a space wherein things aren't relative or defined by points of view?

I would want to become comfortable with that space regardless of the risk to my point of view. It would seem that space would allow me to see the Truth in your point of view, regardless of how I feel.

And then I stumble across these words from Parker Palmer:
”So truth has nothing to do with manufacturing a world, keeping it at a distance, manipulating it to suit our needs, or owning it as property. Nor does it mean projecting our psyches on the world’s screen. Rather, truth involves entering a relationship with someone or something genuinely other than us, but with whom we are intimately bound. Truth contains the image we are seeking – the image of community in which we were first created, the image of relatedness between knower and known that certain philosophers of science now affirm.”

Might it be that an intimacy with truth could shape our point of view to something that is closer to View? And if so, wouldn’t that relationship take into account all that makes up who we are, all the things that shaped the point from where stand while beckoning us into so much more?

”‘Truth is personal’ means not only that the knower’s person becomes part of the equation, but that the personhood of the known enters the relation as well. The known seeks to know me even as I seek to know it; such is the logic of love.” - Palmer

Letting Go for What's To Come

2010-04-28T19:09:00.002-06:00

New Zealand Sky Diving
Originally uploaded by _Rufus

Have you ever jumped out of plane? Ever made a swing from a trapeze?

Have you felt that fear and tension in the moments right after you let go, when the memory of holding on to something solid, stable, secure still tingles with longing memory in your finger tips? When you can see what you left and a quick conversation inside your head starts with, “Now why did I go and do that?”
Have you felt the weight, the electricity that hums in that space between letting go and the next?

”A place that demands being honest with yourself without regard to the cost of personal anxiety. A place that demands being present with all of yourself…left alone with an immediacy that astonishes, chastens, and exults.”(Kushner) might be one way of describing it.

I have jumped from a plane and I have swung from a trapeze. I still remember the feeling of letting go of that Cessna’s wing-brace and the last glimpse of its undercarriage that shot my heart into my throat... then falling that felt more like flying above the Black Hills of South Dakota, before the rip-chord was pulled and I sensed something like solid in that parachute silence. Stuff like this doesn’t leave your memory, it changes you. Or at least gives context for the bigger things in life to come.

As I continue to live in one of the most transitional, liminal spaces of my life so far I have these times wherein I feel that tension, the electric memory of those moments between letting go and feeling the touch of what is next. It might be that the physical risk, jumps I take throughout life are only foreshadows, preemptive metaphors of the deeper, beneath the surface risk and jumps I will take later in life…. like now.

When those Hobbits left home they didn’t know it at the time but they soon found that they were likely not to make it ”there and back again” like Bilbo once did. And even when they did return, they didn’t all stay. Some were too changed to call it Home anymore.

So it is.

In the midst of considering this moment, The National’s new song “The Runaway” has been playing low in the corner of my thoughts. Particularly, the words, ”We don’t bleed when we don’t fight…I won’t be no runaway, ‘cause I won’t run.” There is a difference between leaving the solid, secure spaces as a runaway... and leaving them for the fight, for something better that keeps the blood flowing. It takes letting go for what’s to come. Even as there is that scary flash realization that you can’t go back…

What Are People NOT Discussing?

2010-04-20T15:30:00.003-06:00

Chess tutorial
Originally uploaded by Ali Tse

Most of the in depth information I accumulate in the world comes through various podcasts I listen to while running. The rest comes from life experience or the Internets. I discovered a synthesis of all three while listening to Bob Edwards interview George Friedman, founder of STRATFOR. For whatever choreography of coincidences, listening to this interview felt like stepping out of a barrage, a rain storm into a momentary alcove of Big Picture perspective.

I have been a subscriber in some shape or form to Friedman’s STRATFOR for a few years. In essence, it is intelligence reports for the private citizen. They write global analysis of nearly any international incident or hotspot, and they are scary accurate. When you read what STRATFOR has to say about the latest tensions in Israel and compare it to what little hyped-up info blitz you get from any of the news networks on the same subject, you start seeing just how much a waste of time most news really is. The usual news outlets tend to focus on the hype, whereas an intelligence report looks at all the moving pieces in any given situation. The cable/network news tends to focus on what’s happening right now and hardly ever gives thought to whether or not “Now” matters in the context of what’s come before and what will come later. STRATFOR seems to always ask “what does this latest incident have to do with the bigger picture on the regional and global scale, and with the future?”

So, running along listening to Friedman talk about his new book, ”The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century,” I was already in for the long haul when Edwards quoted this from his book: ”Geopolitics teaches us that there are a few things that are unprecedented, and few opportunities for changing the game. Presidents and recessions come and go, but the long processes that truly change our lives are still there and they are not always the things that people are expecting or discussing.”

Which provokes the question: What are the things that I am not expecting? What are the things that people are NOT discussing?

Throughout the interview, Friedman gives his educated guess (and a highly educated one at that) as to what and where things will matter in the years to come – be it economically, geopolitically, and even where the next big wars might be. It’s not some wingnut’s speculation. It’s more like a chess-pro who sees the world as a chessboard, thinking numerous moves ahead of the “Next” move.

For instance, is China the threat that our current fever pitch would like us to think it is? ”China’s not a very serious country…according to Chinese figures 600 million Chinese out of 1.3 billion live on $3/day per household; another 440 million live in households earning between $3-$6/day. In other words, China on the whole is a country that has a standard of living equivalent to that of sub-Sahara Africa. There is a part of China where people earn more than $20,000/year and that is 60 million people… less than 6% of China. We obsess over those 60 million… when we think of China it is very important to think of the 95% which is an extraordinarily poor country and where unemployment means starvation – not that your 401k plan is in trouble.” And that is just one part of the few pieces in play with regards to China. A big part and probably something you nor I never really consider when we think of China and its impact on our lives.

It is a bit clinical in approach – looking at data and making speculations based off such data. It is mostly absent of any moral response or considerations – as in, why are we not appalled and moved to “do something” about the fact that most of China is starving? It’s complicated. Far more complicated than we would like to give it time to be. And this is just one country out of the whole world, regardless of how big it is.

By the end of my run, and well after the interview ended, it was as if someone smacked me across the head and reminded me that there is far, far more going on than I know, that we live in a large world that has numerous pieces that make up the whole – entities that I have no control over no matter how much I would like to delude myself into thinking I do. And it’s not so much an abdication and surrender to the powers that be, but a chance to breathe easy, remember my place and part and keep asking the questions about what no one seems to be discussing.

In case you missed the link, you can hear the interview: HERE

Characters with a Story

2010-04-17T23:17:00.005-06:00

The Fruit Talking - Day 73
Originally uploaded by iamkr

I have this story that's been mulling and brewing over a slow heat in the back burner of my imagination. As I think about the characters, the story and all the moving parts that are now in the mix, I am starting to see the flavor come through, the scent of what will be. If I had taken to write the whole thing out in one fell swoop a few years back when the story first came to me, it would be flat, colorless and just one more cute, maybe fanciful piece of fiction. Stories with rich characters take time, and not just talent.

Meeting new people, hearing about their journey, how all the pieces have come together to make them who they are – if I could get paid for this I might just have my dream job. The real characters are far more complicated than the ones we make up in our heads or read in cheaply crafted novels. And this fascinates me.

I wonder, though, as a writer, why it is that so many popular books and popular films have such shallow, two-dimensional characters? Do we celebrate these stories because they seem simple enough, easy to digest and something less like real life? Are we really striving to be, to swim in this kind of shallow water, to be this two-dimensional in our day-to-day living?

I recently heard Hal Holbrook say the reason he is choosing work in lower paying, independent films is because that is where the characters are worth playing; that the blockbuster films don’t engage real life as it effects real people.

I am in constant awe at how multi-dimensional real people can be, even if they aren’t aware of it. Nobody is just a housewife trying to makes sense of things, or just a man with a knack for climbing, or even just a kid filled with his or her dose of angst. There is a story behind the story, with so many moving pieces that make up the person before the here and now. And even here and now will have an effect on who that person will be six months, or a year from now. Kinetic. Perpetual.

So when I revisit this book I’ve been mulling, and think of the few characters involved, I think how I didn’t really know them when I first started, how simple and two-dimensional they were. And that wasn’t enough. Maybe it is that lack of knowing that has kept me from telling their story. I had to hear them out over a few years, and may still have more to come. Their complexity informs the story they are in and where it goes from here. And so it seems to be the case with real characters… if I listen well enough, taking time to let things brew.

On Health and Care

2010-04-13T22:08:00.003-06:00

G K Chesterton as Bacchus
Originally uploaded by seadipper

I’ve been re-reading G.K. Chesterton’s “Heretics” – a collection of essays in philosophical, literary, and theological criticisms. In a chapter on H.G. Wells, Chesterton takes a moment to talk about Health and Care. The context is different but the way he uses the words we have so frequently tossed about of late is fun and interesting. It caught my attention in light of our current brouhahas on the subject we have termed “Health Care:”

”The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has health to do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In special and abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarly unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. If we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men, and they ought to be told to be careful. But when we are sociologists we are addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity. And humanity ought to be told to be recklessness itself. For all the fundamental functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution... It is the first law of health that our necessities should not be accepted as necessities; they should be accepted as luxuries. Let us, then, be careful about the small things, such as a scratch or a slight illness, or anything that can be managed with care. But in the name of all sanity, let us be careless about the important things, such as marriage, or the fountain of our very life will fail.”

This was written in 1905 – over a hundred years ago. Yet, it might have been in yesterday’s Time’s column, even if not said so eloquently. After all, the past was just a moment ago.

Thoughts?

Composing a Symphony (pt 2)

2010-04-08T16:01:00.001-06:00

Composing a Symphony
Originally uploaded by Lauren Barkume

(This is the 2nd part of a series I am posting around a week I spent isolated, cut-off from human contact in a cabin high in the mountains. You can read the 1st part HERE)

When I headed into solitude it wasn’t just to get the blood flowing again in those dried spaces in my soul. I was hoping to explore what it is I forgot to be, what it was that was dreamed in me so long ago. It is not a mistake that it takes blood flow to find the Dream again.

Though I had no TV, I did have my Macbook and a few movies to watch. One of which was ”Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium” - a film that unusually gets me every time (must be the kid and creative in me). In beginning of the film Molly Mahoney says to Mr. Magorium:
”I’m stuck….When I was a kid I could play Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto and everyone was talking about my potential. Well, I’m 23 now and everyone’s still talking about my potential. But if you ask me to play the song I know best…. I’ll still play Rachmaninov’s 2nd.”
Mr. Magorium responds: ”May I suggest you stun the world with Molly Mahoney’s 1st!”
She says, ”I want to. But I am Stuck!”

Rachmaninov’s 2nd is no easy thing, and most people would be satisfied with even coming close to playing that piece of music. But it wasn’t Mahoney’s… it was someone else’s idea, someone else’s dream.

Shane Hipps once said, “We may borrow the dreams of people we envy. But if we come to terms with the fact that we are borrowing dreams outside of us, it can hurt.” And it leaves us spent and tired, or angry and controlling. I have known this hurt. Like Mahoney, I grew up with people talking of my potential. My potential for what, I never heard. And I have had quite the extraordinary life, doing some pretty amazing things, being involved with cool projects, creative ground-breaks, adventurous risk. Only, lately, have I felt the empty road of dreamless pursuits. I wouldn’t say I felt stuck, but I felt more like a gun for hire than a generatively creative man stepping into his skin.

Now the irony is, over the past several months - months wherein I’ve not been able to get anything off the ground other than various freelance writing/editing gigs, months where I’ve lost a lot of the normal things that give a person a sense of security and place – I have felt more in my skin on most days than ever before. Maybe that’s a result of Liminal space, “a place where boundaries dissolve a little and we stand there, on the threshold, getting ourselves ready to move across the limits of what we were into what we are to be.” After all, Israel spent 40ish years (translation: a very long time) in the wilderness un-learning to live like slaves while finding out who they really were all along – and it looked nothing like slavery.

Rachmaninov didn’t write his 2nd in one fell swoop. It took time. Mahoney’s 1st wasn’t a finished product but an ongoing composition played out each day. And I came to see some of the pieces to the puzzle that weren’t in view before that time in solitude – or they were but I didn’t trust them, wasn’t sure what to do about them.

Finally, Hipps says, “Are you pursuing the very thing you were made to be, that you simply are? If so, you will find that whatever challenges you face are faced with courage and hope. You’ll find that no matter how steep the hill gets, you’ll always have enough strength to climb it, because it’s just what you’re made to do.

These are the questions that have to be placed before us throughout life... our task is not to answer the questions once and for all. Our task is to keep those questions in front of us on a regular basis: Am I chasing someone else’s dream or Am I doing what I’m made to be?”

Cloud Hidden pt. 1

2010-04-01T20:40:00.003-06:00

Cabin in the Snow - Day 57
Originally uploaded by iamkr

This is the first in what will likely be a few different post around a recent trip I made into solitude and silence…

Van Morrison wrote a song a few years back called, ”Alan Watts Blues” in which he sings, ” Well I've got to get out of the rat-race now, I'm tired of the ways of mice and men, And the empires all turning into rust again. Out of everything nothing remains the same, That's why I'm cloud hidden…Whereabouts unknown.” A few weeks ago I knew it was Time - it’s that tug deep in the heart that needs to step off the grid and disappear into solitude. And with church-mice being billionaires compared to me, I had to get creative with how it was going to happen. It helps to have friends with high places – the place in question is a cabin near the Sangre De Cristo Mountains sitting at around 10,000 feet, tickling treeline. The huge plus is that it has no internet, no phone, no TV – which, also, meant I could have died and a few weeks would pass before someone thought to look for me, if at all (a not so huge plus, maybe?)

I drove there on the front edge of a blizzard, nearly sliding off the dirt road in mud and snow. There was so much snow that I had to park on the road and hike about ¼ mile up to the house in knee to waist-deep drifts with food and clothes on my back. Twice. Not to mention, the snow was blowing sideways. There were a few times I wondered if this was such a good idea, if I hadn’t lost a few more marbles than necessary. The wind blew and the snow was so constant through the night that apparently it knocked out the power in the valley and I woke to a powerless place….

A place which was, also, the state of my soul by then. And this can be as good as any place to start breathing again. As Richard Rohr said, ”It’s the things you cannot do anything with or about that tend to do something with you.”

That much silence, that much solitude takes some adjustment. Buechner nailed it: “it was the silence, which we usually find so awkward. We're embarrassed; we're afraid of silence because we use words so often not to reveal who we are but to conceal who we are. We hide behind our chatter. In silence is a kind of sense of being stripped naked.” Being stripped is an apt way to describe what I went through those first few hours, and days.

The week before I made this journey into isolated silence, I was caught up in this show on Hulu.com called ”Day Break”. It revolves around this detective who wakes up to a day in which he is framed for murder and everyone he loves gets killed or hurt, the day ending with him apparently part of a bigger conspiracy than he knew and seemingly nothing he can do about it. The catch is that when he goes to sleep, the same day starts all over again when he wakes. So, the show is about him trying to figure out all the moving parts of the day and maybe if he does this or that, changes this or that aspect of the plot, the day will finally end and he gets on with his life.

I was captivated by this show because without knowing it at first, I was resonating with his frustrations, with how futile it felt some times for him; his going to sleep thinking he figured it out only to wake up and it was still the same day. By the end of the season I was so invested in him finding resolution, finding the next day, because maybe, just maybe, it meant I could find the Next in my own life and get on with living.

It was in this space that I entered silence and solitude. Wait. No. I fought through ridiculous conditions and obstacles to get to this silence for my life. And, then, I knew a bit of what T.S. Eliot meant when he wrote, ”Oh, my soul, be prepared to meet him who knows how to ask questions.”

And for the first time in months, I woke up to a new day…

Austin Collins - None of This Is About Music Anyway

2010-03-19T13:43:00.005-06:00

austinc-046
Originally uploaded by billellisonphotographer

Austin Collins and I used to soundtrack drives around Southwest Colorado with Whiskeytown rarities, Weezer, Robert Earl Keen, and Uncle Tupelo. We were flat mates in Austin, TX during 9/11 (after working in the mountain-guiding world) and for all the fun we had in that house I got to see Collins step down the road that has now led to his third album. When I heard the initial tracks on Wrong Control, I was stunned by how different it sounds from his previous works and how.. mature it is both lyrically and musically. I played it through twice and then listened to it over and over throughout the following weeks. I still do.

I had the chance to interview Austin about the album and his work with the Rainbirds - drummer Craig Bagby and Guitarist Dylan McDougall. The three together have made pop and optimism cool again in Americana. Wrong Control has more edge, more rock, and more wisdom than Collins’ previous albums – Roses are Black (2008) & Something Better (2005). If you are in Austin for SXSW, he’s playing HERE.

You’ve taken what seems to be a distinct and intentional change of direction with Wrong Control- it’s in the sound, the writing, the depth and even the tightness of the band on each track. Speak to how and why? What changed for you?

Well, the tightness comes from all of us playing together for so long now. I say so long as if we’re the Eagles or something, but our three years together have really made a difference. As far as the writing goes, I can only speak for the ones I wrote, but I think in life you have different “eras” or periods, you know? I never want to lose the depth or the edge to the material, because I think that’s what gives art life. But it’s the first time in years I can look back and say I was feeling optimistic. The record has Hope where the first two not so much.

Wrong Control has you singing lead in nearly every song but the album is much more a collaboration with The Rainbirds than just “Austin Collins and his band.” What did you enjoy about this collaborative effort? How was it different from previous albums?

I enjoyed all parts of it. We’re light on drama but we do have some spirited discussions on how to approach songs and who gets to sleep in the coveted back seat of the suburban. We work really well as a unit. I think the major difference on this record is we had a more comfortable approach to recording. This is the same team as we had on Roses (Collin’s second album), so it sort of felt like a reunion – we just picked up where we had left off.

Did you have more mastery over this album as a whole than previous albums? How did this influence the creative process?

I certainly felt more at home. I knew better what to expect and definitely had a certain sound in mind as the goal. In a sense, yes, I had more mastery – the surprises don’t surprise you like they used to. I’m certainly not a veteran, but we were more familiar with how the process develops throughout your time.

You’ve performed solo and with a band – the Rainbirds being your most consistent – even before Something Better. In those various contexts, how have you seen your playing change?

As a solo artist I’ve learned to relax and be myself, you know – no more stage fright. I’ve grown more comfortable connecting with the audience over the years. The stage shouldn’t be a barrier. I’ve grown as a musician, as well, mostly from playing with the band. Dylan and Craig are both excellent musicians and my skills have improved just being around them.

You’ve changed how you use your voice on Wrong Control. There is less country, less twang, less Dylanesque and deeper tones/resonance, more Jay Farrar influence behind the sound. What brought the change? Was that more of Will Johnson’s production decisions or did you write the songs that way?

Most of the vocal change came from the change in melodies I was working with. I wrote the songs that way and I guess I learned how to use my voice in some different ways as well – baby steps. And of course, Will coached me on a lot of things, especially in dynamics, creating a mood with how you sing – even envisioning what the song looks like to sing for that particular feel.

With “Island,” you make an affront to John Donne’s notion that “No man is an Island,” - a verse often used to speak against individualism and independence. How did you come to write this song not just lyrically, but with such a distinct pop-rock sound?

The basic structure [of the album] was already going pop and this one was the perfect song for Will to get a hold of. It’s probably the song that reflects his touch the most. “Island” does address Donne’s statement about the need for community and actually I agree with him, but that doesn’t mean you can’t choose who you are in community with. That was the point I was trying to get across. Here is “Island:”

“Centerpiece” is distinctly different from the rest of the songs on Wrong Control and a slower, mellower end to an otherwise fast, harder over all album. Why did you decide to end the album on this note?

That song seems to allow you to relax a little bit after some somewhat aggressive listening. It’s a thinker - Seemed like the right way to wrap it up.

How are you approaching the marketing and promotion of this album differently than in the past? (Be it more direct connection to fans, or social media, videos, etc)

The use of social media is pretty much required these days for marketing anything. The good thing about social media is that everyone can go as far as they want to with it. I was pretty resistant to the Facebook thing at first, but I found it to be a very natural way to connect with fans and friends. I have regular email conversations with people all over the country that I’ve gotten to know through music and otherwise. Besides that we’re giving away a lot of music and trying to get people who dig it to tell their friends.

“Worn” has the marking of a man in love far past the honeymoon yet still hopeful. And though drummer Craig Bagby wrote it, you sing it as if it is your own. How has the married life shaped you and your writing? And to connect the two, how has your writing shaped you in your marriage?

”Worn” is a song that anybody who’s ever been in a relationship can relate to. Everybody gets that “I’m sick of all of it” moment. The cool thing is that Craig’s protagonist sticks it out. I wrote a lot about relationships in my previous work. I think I’ve taken all of that trash out now, though, for the most part. Marriage has taught me that life goes on, so I think my songs reflect that now too.

You’ve managed to stay relatively close to home – Houston, and nearly 14 years in Austin, TX. Why?

Austin’s the only city I could live in Texas, so I guess that’s the main factor. My family is in Houston so it’s a good compromise. And being here for so long now and made so many great friends I don’t see myself leaving any time soon.

What have you learned about your self in staying so close to home and family?

I’ve learned that it’s much better to have people who love and support you only two hours away. I’ve also learned that a two-hour drive can become a barrier and an excuse if you let it be.

When 9/11 happened you lost your job a few days after the event. This time seems to have been somewhat catalytic in you giving your self more to your songwriting, and thus your current music career. How do you look back at that time? Do you think you would be releasing your 3rd album if things had stayed the way they were on 9/10?

I look back at that time fondly and remember how much fun we all had living together. Most of us were young, dumb, and freshly unemployed. It was almost like a second round of college. That time was certainly a turning point. Losing my job after 9/11 set me on a path to meet up with the people who would guide me into music. Ultimately I can’t be sure of what might have been, but I wouldn’t change anything. None of this is really about music anyway.

To find out more about Austin Collins and to buy Wrong Control go to Austincollins.net

Yielding the Way

2010-03-10T22:18:00.002-07:00

Yield - day 39
Originally uploaded by iamkr

I am convinced the parts of me below the waterline, the quiet soul is always moving the surface more than I would like to admit. This picture was taken on an evening I was rolling into Buena Vista for the weekend – a weekend I knew would be filled with reunions and storytelling, but also rest and yielding. Yield signs are optional stops, more like slow down, take a breath, catch your bearings as you move forward. They also speak of giving the right of way when needed, but that takes slowing down enough to know when to give it. Below the waterline knew Yielding was needed, and that maybe in the yielding, I would get to see something beautiful reflected.

Not an hour after taking that picture, I was unexpectedly seeing old friends – some I haven’t seen in 5-7 years; I was meeting their children, hearing about their lives. At one point I looked around the room and we had five generations ranging in ages 72 to 5 and we have all shared parts of the journey in different capacities these past 20 years. We sat back after dinner to hear my old roommate - who is now a professor of Classics nearing 40 - tell the multifaceted adventure of his engagement and wedding plans. All these years and life behind us, and we picked up where left off like it was just a moment ago.

That Yield sign came up on me quicker than I expected with that roomful of friends. Having lost most of my voice earlier in the week I couldn’t say much. I could only listen and smile and nod and take pictures:

The weekend continued, and I was moving at a near glacial pace as if my whole soul was taking the time to slow down and breath even if I wasn’t ready for it. I was able to see more, hear more, and be present to people in ways I would not have otherwise if I had been my normal move and go, what’s next agenda-type self. In the Torah there is a moment in which Joseph (as in the Technicolor Dreamcoat boy) tells his brothers as they are leaving, “Don’t quarrel on the way.” A Hasidic Rabbi said of this, ”For this reason Joseph said to them, ‘the hour of your arrival at your destination has been appointed by Heaven. If you hurry on the way, you will only be delayed by some other reason. So don’t quarrel with the way.’” Don’t fight with the journey, might be another way of saying it. And in my weekend I learned quickly that to Yield is to yield, to not fight with the way, to be ok with not getting much done.

When I took that picture of the Yield sign I had no idea how much was being said in a snapshot, how much some other part of me was sending a message I needed to hear. I am still learning not to quarrel with the way, but giving up the fight isn’t always my first choice. And it’s counter-intuitive to our culture. Still, something seems to beg for more breathing room in the places below the waterline of our lives.

Lost in the Fabric

2010-02-25T18:06:00.002-07:00

Fabric - Day 31
Originally uploaded by iamkr

Some days are Wide-Angles. The kind of day where all the things I see are out there on some grand horizon and I am just trying to take it all in. Other days are Macro-Focused, giving time and space to see the stitchings and cross-hatches in the fabric of my life. I need both.

Today I got lost again on a run. It’s a pretty common thing for me. I tend to run towards areas that I haven’t seen before, look around and ooh and ahh. Before long I not only don’t recognize the landscape, I am not sure how to get back to where I started my run. And it’s not like I am going to stop, turn around, and go back the way I came. Really? That’s just boring. No. I will keep running, making turns here and there with the child-like part of me that trust I will eventually get home. It might be a bit longer than I expected. It might mean I get tired before I get there, that my legs might give up before I reach my destination. But I will at least enjoy the landscape that is new, and unexplored.

Today, when I noticed I was “lost” I began to chuckle and think how many other times this has happened in as many places. (I got lost running in the Dominican Republic and in Auckland, New Zealand all the time.) As I was laughing at my situation, I was thinking about the Wide-Angles and the Macros in my life. And as a timely soundtrack to this pondering, Moby’s “Extreme Ways,” came on. ”Extreme ways are back again, Extreme places I didn’t know…Extreme ways I know will part the colors of my sea, perfect colored me. Extreme ways they help me, they help me out late at night. Extreme places I had gone that never seen any light…”

Getting lost gives plenty of time to explore the extremes in one’s life – be it the big picture that comes in Wide or the little rooms inside a soul that need a Macro-focus to be opened into the light. Getting lost can be a good thing even if there is snow falling on the horizon and it’s moving towards me. Because not much in life is terminal… and even those might just be new beginnings that never would have been discovered if I never got lost once in awhile.

Day's End on Mars

2010-02-18T13:14:00.003-07:00

Sunset on Mars, originally uploaded by markaudette28.

So the sun was going down on the horizon. I sipped my margarita thinking about all that had passed as another day on Mars came to an end…

WAIT, WHAT???

Yep. They actually have a picture of a sunset on Mars taken by the rover Spirit - a little guy that looks like WALL-E with wings and a neck. If you missed this bit of news, the picture was taken nearly five years ago. That doesn’t diminish the awe of it.It stirs me to my childhood growing up in Houston thinking I will be an Astronaut when i grow up. We all thought that down there, because we were inundated by the Space Program and NASA was literally in our backyard.

There are things that we hear about, imagine, think about in the abstract and never give much thought to their tangibility. I used to wonder what the sky looked like on the Southern side of the globe until 2002. I sat on my deck one night looking up into the unfamiliar star-filled sky and felt the weight of the 10,000 miles between New Zealand and home. It was a bit terrifying, actually, and awesome. So, when I see an actual sunset pic taken from a day’s end on Mars’ surface… I get that same sense of awe and terrifying comfort.

Maybe it’s that for the first time in the history of man, we actually have an idea of what it looks like to end a day on another planet. Maybe it’s that for all the beauty and wonder that we all have when we watch the sun set from our spot on the planet, there’s another spot… on another planet that stirs similar wonder and beauty – and we have the pictures to prove it. Or maybe it’s that this picture speaks not to our insignificance but that the Creator of the Universe is so big and cool that he has a thing for sunsets in any context; and if he has a thing for sunsets on Mars in their simple beauty, then maybe he has a thing for all the complexities I encounter in the flash of a moment on a daily basis.

There’s more going on here and things are far bigger than they let on…

(If you want to see a bigger version of this sunset it is HERE )

15%, Give or Take

2010-02-08T12:46:00.004-07:00

Recently, a friend - whom I have known in quite a few different stages of life and simply adore - flew in from New Orleans (Yay! Saints!) and we got to talking over dinner about Change. We were sharing stories about recent emails we each have received from shattered friendships seeking forgiveness, or at the least, apologizing. As we traded our experiences, our responses to these emails, I got to thinking about an episode of “Modern Family” called “Fifteen Percent.”

At the end of the show, one of the characters, Mitchell, says “Can people change? I don’t know. People are who they are, give or take fifteen percent – that’s how much people can change if they really want to…”

It’s true. The people that change beyond the 15% are the ones that have had some significantly, life-altering, you-would-never-wish-this-on-anyone experience… and even then, many soon revert back to who they have always been.

As my friend and I were talking about this, it became clear just how much of a gift that reality can be. It gives me the freedom to accept folks for who they are. It frees up energy normally spent trying to get them to change so that can be spent enjoying each other, allowing space for grace. (On the other hand, it’s a good reminder that the crazy, destructive types tend to always be the crazy destructive types and it is good to give them a wide berth.)

As much as I “get” this, it is more common that I don’t and waste time puckered over something I can’t change to begin with. But then… it only takes reading anything I’ve written here at The Ink to see my own 15% of change happens at a glacial pace most of the time.

My friend and I wrapped up dinner so she could get some sleep before that up-before-God flight back to NOLA, and I thought over how much she had changed in the years I’ve known her. Her change that keeps coming isn’t so much about a 180 turn as it is becoming more who she’s always been in the ways that are good and alive in her own skin. Whether that’s just a degree of 15% or something else, I can’t say, but I have to think it’s accepting each other where we’re at that has allowed us to see and celebrate each other where we’ve be-come.

Update
So, I was reading Shannalee T'Koy's take on Change and I said that we seem to be looking at the same piece of art from different sides of the room. It's not that we are born as we are and don't change. It is my experience we are born who we are and, if we take the risk, spend the rest of life becoming who we were meant to be.

Along with that, is the specific realm of marriage. I am not, but I am surrounded by many that have been for 15, 20, 30+ years. And something I hear from each of them is how the person they married doesn't seem to change much as the years go by...it's that they stop trying to make them into what they imagined when they married them in the first place, and so allow them space to become who they were meant to be. There is a grace in accepting each other, a freedom that we lose when we can't seem to get the Other to change into who we imagine them to be.

All easier said than done...

Generative Living: Prints for Haiti

2010-02-04T09:50:00.002-07:00

Prints for Haiti - a photo gallery sale to benefit Haiti, originally uploaded by zinkwazi.

Richard Rohr wrote, “The deepest inscription in [a man] is to generate life in others.” And that can take many forms. Photography is an avenue in creativity that seems chalk full with generative life – we are moved by images, we are visual people.

Some of the guys out of Brooks in Santa Barbara have decided to use their creativity with a lens to hopefully generate life for the ongoing recover work in Haiti. If you aren’t familiar with the Brooks Institute, you might be familiar with work from their various teachers and former students. Most everything I’ve learned about capturing images, and moments on digital or analog film has come from some of these guys.

This past week a project was started at http://www.printsforhaiti.com. You can purchase high quality prints and in return everything after the $10 cost for S&H gets split between the American Red Cross and Direct Relief International. So, buy a $100 print, $90 goes to Haiti and you get some outstanding work to hang on a wall, a small piece of generative life – in more ways than one. Oh, and The Brooks Institute has decided to match every dollar up to $5,000.

In keeping with the deepest inscription to generate life for others I have donated 4-5 of my favorite Holga shots from the past few years.

You can, also, follow this ongoing work via Twitter at http://twitter.com/printsforhaiti

UPDATE February 8, 2010
DMIACAST interviewed Gabriel Cano about the Prints for Haiti project. You can listen: HERE. (Thanks DIMA host @Bmundy for donating to the Project via your iphone app sales.
http://www.dimacast.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=579869

Matthew Ryan on the State of Union

2010-01-28T08:28:00.005-07:00

Matthew Ryan is one of the current best songwriters you didn’t know you were missing. With his twelfth album, Ryan explores the distance within the intimacies of men and women, between humanity. Dear Lover is, also, a homegrown project from beginning to end, recorded in Ryan’s home studio in Nashville, TN, and released on his newly created label The Dear Future Collective. Ryan has left behind the large record labels, creatively connecting with listeners through the Web 3.0 world of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, while performing house concerts alongside venue shows. I Interviewed Ryan about his integrative approach to music promotion, the creative process and art’s centrality in re-humanization:

K: You made "Dear Lover" from beginning to end on your own, including starting your own label for distribution. Why the change from previous projects?

M: Well, I started the label with my publicist, Monica Hopman. She and I have worked together for years and a friendship developed. Often we both found our careers and our work at the mercy of what label's were willing or not willing to do. There comes a point where you no longer want to be held under the whims of someone else's ambitions. So much of the music business now seems custom built for the DIY model, it seemed only natural to go ahead and take the wheel. Dear Lover fits that self-possessed spirit as well. I've always wanted to make a record by myself from beginning to end. My goal was to make the purest music that I could without any influence from any other. I felt it was time to lean entirely on my own strengths and weaknesses. And like Joe Strummer said, "As long as you have someone else to blame, you'll never learn nothing." I'm determined to define my own independence. That being said, there were times with Dear Lover that felt more like Moby Dick than making music. But I just stayed at it and kept pushing myself. It took 4 months to make Dear Lover. I really tested myself. I'm so proud of the record and that I followed through on it.

K: A few years back you started asking how to better connect with those that buy your music - posing the question openly on MySpace - and since have used various social media forms such as Twitter, and Facebook to this end. How have you seen these mediums effect your relationships with fans, your music and with the music business?

M: Well, I've always felt that the Internet could offer a new intimacy to all of us. It seems at times that the static and sheer mass of it all acts more like a force of isolation. To me, music is a great connector. I guess I wanted to see if I could be a part of some humanizing, worldwide community building. But I also wanted to try and engage people, rather than sell to people. I was never comfortable with some of the more high-school popularity contest aspects of the music business. My hope is to continue to find ways to attract people to my music in the purest ways possible.

K: Dear Lover and the Dear Future Collective have been digitally in motion for a few months. What have you discovered, learned so far? Where do you want to see things go?

M: It's a big blizzard of a world, but creativity and honesty can go far to attract new people to you. It's amazing, every time we exact an inspired idea through some sort of DIY video or blog or news, we see a spike in interest and digital sales. Just when we fear we've hit a wall, some other idea comes to push us further along. We keep growing, slow and steady outside the law. It's beautiful and scary though, because the challenge is to gain loyalty from listeners as they ebb and flow in and out. We won't really know what we've accomplished until I start touring in February. And that leads me to my hope for the future of music: that we as a society slow down and absorb those things that are meaningful to us. I don't know if it's completely true, but I often get the sense that we are not only an instant judgment society, but a constant consumption society. Maybe I'm being reverential to how I welcome the arts or information, but I've always found work that slowly unfolded for me was ultimately more rewarding. And I can't help but think there's a consequence to the slash and burn speed of things. But like I said, I really don't know, we may just be experiencing some evolution of how humans experience things. And if that's the case, I hope that they write and talk intelligently and passionately about what they love and what worries them.

K: With Dear Lover, how have you seen your writing and worldview evolve over 12 albums?

M: It has always been my goal to not only be a life-long artist, but to also be a constantly searching artist. I feel that I'm getting better at what I do, and I'm just getting started. There's a humility and easy assuredness to the great work. And that's what I want to achieve. I've been trying to tell a story about the distance between who we are as men and women, and who we wish to be. And the only reason you write about that is the belief that you can close the gap if you converse with it directly and honestly.

K: Each album seems to carry its own story arc both lyrically and musically; story depth seems central to your song writing - "Dulce Et Decorum Est," "We are Snowmen, "The Ballad of a limping Man.” How do you approach your songwriting as a storyteller and what part do the instruments and rhythms you choose contribute to the story?

M: It really is hard to describe how I write. I generally look for the spark of an idea, or the spark finds me. Either way, it has to be something that moves me. Once I find that I just follow the trail to what the song wants to be. It's almost as if the subconscious is where the really poetry is found. I just try and follow my gut and trust that when I feel content and the song's finished, that there's a cumulative emotionalism and/or message. Above all though, I try to tell as many sides of the story as I can, while as best I can, try to be honest from every angle.

K: You seem to use various genres all within one album, how does that kind of diversity come about?

M: I really do view each song on an album like a scene in a movie. And those decisions are based upon the arc of the overall story and where those songs arrive. Sometimes I feel that I've underplayed a song’s traditional strengths to meet the cinematic ambitions I have. But, I'm proud to say that any of my songs can be stripped to their roots, and you'll find a perfectly sturdy tree.

K: What influences your creative process?

M: I'm influenced by a feeling, it's a feeling that ignites me and pulls me along. I find that my favorite songs are the ones that feel eternally relevant to my humanity and how I view the world. I assume that if something rings true to me, that it will ring true to others because we are more similar than we are different.

K: What do you enjoy about the creative process?

M: It's one of a handful of events in living that makes me feels completely connected to the moment. But any real moment possesses a thread of primal electricity. Love, sex, hate, peace, hope, comfort and so on. These are the moments we live for. Boredom is a waste of time.

K: What do you see the role of art and artists, be it in the world, or in connections, etc?

M: I think about this often. Possibly because of the nature of my work, it causes me to often reconsider where I'm coming from. My work is often received as depressive or dark. I don't see it that way at all. Above all, I believe art should be useful. To be human means to be confronted by both dark and light. The arts are generally trying to communicate a wisdom we're not necessarily born with. An intimate relationship with the arts can help us to avoid the BIG mistakes. I believe “The Man In Black” by Johnny Cash says it as well as it can be said:

"I'd love to wear a rainbow every day,
And tell the world that everything's OK,
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back,
'Till things are brighter, I'm the Man In Black."

K: How much do visuals inform your music - the video release of "We are Snowmen" or the Paper Matthew Ryan "City Life" video?

M: I wish I had the kind of budgets to make entirely immersive visuals for my songs, maybe one day I will. The cinema in living is so important to my work. The color and light of a room, the expressions we make, and all the details that make for emotional weather. But I also like exacting simple ideas to try and engage people. At any rate, cinema and a sense of depth, movement and 3 dimensions means everything to how we experience the world, it's no different with a song.

K: If I recall, you scored an episode of "One Tree Hill," what was that like for you?

M: Well, I've been lucky to be able to do more and more of this. But with One Tree Hill I got the opportunity to set the entire musical tone of the episode. I really surprised myself; it was an ambitious thing to do over the course of 5 or 6 days. But with some help from David Henry and Mark Schwann, I think it turned out beautiful. I hope to do more actually scoring.

K: Dear Lover is filled with the desire/request/plea for 2nd chances, where does which come from?

M: I don't know, I hadn't really thought about it. I guess I would say that happiness is not a destination. It's something that moves in and out like weather. Maybe it's weather that we earn, maybe it's just a sense that everything is as good as it can be at a particular moment. So much of what we do amounts to perseverance, why must winter always come? But we defend the things we love from darkness, or at the very least we try. The human heart is a delicate, open and mysterious thing.Dear Lover is trying to not only close the gap between a man and a woman, but to engage people with themselves and the ideas and notions that originally ignited them. So, I wouldn't say it's about 2nd chances, I would say it's about never giving up. And the pleas or requests are probably directed more towards the reoccurring themes of trouble and discontent while trying to comfort and re-enforce the promises you make to yourself and the ones you love.

K: How did you come to include Amazing Grace in those last lines of “The Wilderness?"

M: I was singing on mic while writing and that's what came out. I'm not a particularly religious person, but the concept of grace is something I can completely stand beside. Grace in traffic, grace in confrontation, grace in our politics, grace in all the parts and plots of our lives.

Matthew Ryan will be on tour starting February 2010. For more information and to hear the new album Dear Lover streamed in its entirety visit: http://matthewryanonline.com/ or follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/matthewryan101

My Go at a Project 36(5)

2010-01-24T18:15:00.006-07:00

Recently, I was given a new Canon G10. It’s my first true blue, fanciful digital camera. Before this everything I’ve shot was analog medium format 120 on my Holga or Diana+. So, I decided to give it go at a 365 Project - which entails taking at least one picture a day over a year, a pictorial year-in-the-life.

Only, I am doing things a wee bit different. I am titling it: Project 36(5). As I was pondering what goes into such a venture I kept saying to myself “360 project,” as in 360 degrees. It seems more fitting to say it is a 360 degree perspective of a life, since a year in any life will tend to go full circle with all its up and downs. (Plus, I know myself enough to know I will likely miss a few days and not make everyday of the year.)

The first picture was taken improv as I was sitting at a stoplight at the end of a darkly overcast day along the Front Range, when the sun dipped into that space under the clouds and before the mountains. The shot is nearly as is, no enhancements… it was that dark in front of me and that bright behind me. Seems that is often how life can be…

You can follow the Project 36(5) HERE

What do you know about Human Traffik?

2010-01-22T12:36:00.002-07:00

The other night I was watching a typical human triumph CNN story about Haiti – the kind of story that makes Americans feel all warm and fuzzy and good about themselves. One of the reporters went on and on about the Haitian children that are still trapped in rubble that need rescue and “who is going to rescue them?” as he stood next to a demolished building. And as much as I agree with their sentiments, I was muttering to myself, “Yeah, but even if they are rescued… who is going to keep them from being trafficked when all the cameras and rescue workers are gone?”

With so much focus on recovery efforts in Haiti, you probably never considered that many of those children that were in orphanages and are now out and about without protection…they are being picked up and trafficked, turned into slaves, or child prostitutes.

It’s not just in Haiti, it is all over the world. You probably knew that but if you are like me, you probably can’t grasp such abstract immensities. Then, I stumbled upon this TED talk out of India, by Sunitha Krishnan and not only does human trafficking have a face now, the other side of it, the re-humanization of victims has a reality, too. This is something you need to watch, even if you don’t want to:

Krishnan runs a group called Prajwala “that rescues women from brothels and educates their children to prevent second-generation prostitution.” Another organization, here in the States, that is doing some extraordinary work in this realm is Ineternational Justice Mission - creating cases against traffikers and working with governments to rescue the enslaved. Out of the UK is Stop The Traffik that is worth checking out, too. You want to do something? Start somewhere. Start with one of these options.

If you are on Twitter one person you should “follow” is Aaron Coen: http://twitter.com/AaronCohen777 - he is actually one of the folks that goes into these brothels and rescues enslaved humans.

There’s so much more going on in the world if you are willing to look not only at the feel-good stories on the nightly news, but beyond them into the darkness outside the spotlights.

Catalyst in the Adventure

2010-01-18T15:55:00.001-07:00

Road Work
Originally uploaded by iamkr

"The failures aren’t the story, only a catalyst in the adventure," is something I wrote a few weeks back in response to a blog post by Cali Harris, a.k.a. @Caligater. Sometimes, I say stuff and don't really pay attention to what it is that I am saying until someone else points it out...like Cali did. I am sure our mouths say what we didn't know to be true more often than not. As I have thought about it, the more I really do see the catalytic nature of failures, and that catalyst isn't towards destruction but something adventurous, and peaceful.

Then, I stumbled across something Dietrich Bonhoeffer may have written around 1934 in response to Hitler's rise to power: "How does peace come about? Through a system of political treaties? Through the investment of international capital in different countries? Through the big banks, through money?...Through none of these, for the sole reason that in all of them peace is confused with safety. There is no way to peace along the way of safety. For peace must be dared. It is the great venture. It is never safe. Peace is the opposite of security."

Failure is catalytic to adventure.

There is no way to peace along the way of safety.

Bonhoeffer's words were meant for a global, external context in some other time and space. They bother me enough to be internal, personal in the right here and now. (Isn't that the nature of truth, though?) It doesn't take much to see their relevance to the world scene, now, as peace, security and safety are topics non-grata among the talking heads of CNN, FOX, MSNBC. But how much do we consider these words in the quiet hours of morning staring at the ceiling, hiding under pillows?

I've found a peace through the adventures that have risen from my failures. Not a coping peace, nor a get-me-through peace. No, this kind of peace is something akin to what it feels like to be comfortable in one's own skin. And I don't think I would recognize it if I'd chosen safety, security. It might just be because in the failures, I have come to see what I wasn’t, where I was spending life on ventures that had so very little living in them.

It makes me wonder how much peace could actually come to the world if we spent less time fighting for safety, denying our failures and followed the catalytic daring venture that is the opposite of security.

Confessing Prejudice

2010-01-14T09:31:00.002-07:00

"No mexicans, please!"
Originally uploaded by mcsonix

Running long distances on a regular basis makes for a lot of creative ways to fill time. I listen to a ton of podcasts. Most recently, I was listening to a Bob Edwards Weekend Documentary titled “Hating Marcelo: America’s Growing Rage against Latinos.” It was the kind of listening that sucked me in and I soon lost track of how long I had been running. It was a reckoning for me. I had to face my own racist past growing up in Texas, saturated in Latino culture.

Marcelo Lucero, from Ecuador, was “hunted” and stabbed to death by a group of seven boys who were looking to fight Mexican immigrants, but apparently any Latino would do. If this sounds like a chapter out of the old lynching days in the racist South, it happened a little over a year ago… in New York.

My thoughts drifted back to childhood in Houston, Texas, to “wetback” and “beaner” jokes – “wetback” referring to Mexicans that swam the Rio Grande coming to America, and “Beaner” the name given to migrant bean-field workers, usually Mexican. Even the word Mexican was more a derogatory in my rhetoric, usually pronounced “Mes’can,” than it ever was a nationality sharing the same status with “British” or “German.” It wasn’t long until a regretful moment in 6th grade came to mind. My parents were on their way to divorce, family falling apart, and I blew up one day at Flora – the woman who had been as close as an Auntie to me, whose family I stayed with when my parents were off on vacation trying to save their marriage, who had introduced me to everything Latino in such a way that it remains a part of my identity years later. I think it was something to do with her cleaning my room – I didn’t want her to do it anymore because she rearranged things and I already had enough in my world that was being re-arranged. She didn’t understand and as things escalated I called her “just another wetback Mexican that could go back across the border.” (Probably not those exact words, but equally as awful)

When you yell words of hate they hurt you in ways that you never could see until they are out of your mouth; they carry their own barbs that stick in the heart of the accuser. Twenty-five years later, I can still feel the wrenching of my gut when I think of that moment. I not only crossed the line, I should never have danced on its edge in the first place. I know better now. It breaks my heart now. And somehow, in her graciousness, Flora saw past me and knew there was more going on than hating her. It didn’t excuse me, in my book, though.

In case you didn’t know, Texas was Mexico up until around 1836, and as far as Mexico is concerned they constitutionally still see Texas as a rebel province and nothing more. And Mexico is taking it back one river at a time. It is often said that the real border with Mexico starts at the Nueces, just outside the former mission town Hispanically called San Antonio. This hasn’t stopped the white population to generationally look down upon Mexicans (Or any Latino for that matter) as nothing more than a nuisance good for menial labor, lawn care, and house-keeping. Mexican jokes were as common around the dinner table growing up as talks about the weather. In High School, though many of our friends were Latino, that didn’t stop us from making jokes about them. I saw this played out years later when I was mountaineer guiding a group of guys from the same area – all white except the one Mexican – and for six days they never ceased to demean that one Mexican kid, and even after being confronted by us they still saw nothing wrong with it. But I knew why. It was in the air they breathed, it was all they knew. They only got a hint of its severity when we asked Marco how he felt and he talked about how little it made him inside, how it made him all the more unaccepted by them.

America has spent years dialoguing about our treacherous salve, Jim Crow, segregationist racism against Blacks. The election of our first black President was landmark enough to make some speculate that we may have come to terms with our racism. But how much have you heard about that same racism directed at Latinos? How often do you hear stories on the nightly news about the Swastikas burned on the lawns of Latino immigrant workers? Or, before this article, did you even know who Marcelo Lucero was; And that he wasn’t “some Mexican” but an Ecuadorian out on the town with his brother the night he was killed, because any ol “beaner” would do?

The surprising commonality in these hate crimes against Latinos is that it is youth, high school aged kids carrying out the sentencing. High school kids just like I once was – unaware of how my words were killing a part of “friends” whose parents spoke Spanish better than English; kids like those that I guided just a few years ago who mocked Marco and saw nothing wrong with it.

I don’t have some answer to conclude, some rally cry against the oppressors. At the end of the day, I have my self to face in the mirror. This, this is my confession. I thought I was far nobler, better than those Klan men of the Deep South lynching sons of Adam for the color of their skin. In the midst of a run, I was reminded of my own racist tendencies so many years ago. Tendencies that I may very well have been running from with as much energy as I was that day I heard Marcelo Lucero’s story.

Vast

2010-01-08T11:12:00.004-07:00

not alone
Originally uploaded by zinkwazi

My Afrikaans speaking friend Greg Lawler took this picture to the right. I keep coming back to it because it is one of those great shots that says so very much with so very little.

It’s ominous.

It’s what my life feels and looks like a lot these days… in the midst of something extraordinary and huge and vast and half unseen and beautiful, mysterious... and that can be a good thing. Another friend once said of the ocean, “I don’t like it because there are so many things you can’t see that are underneath the water. It creeps me out, especially when those unseen things brush up against my leg…” I hear what he is saying, and as a kid growing up in the ocean, I had my share of mystery contact and nibbles below the surface.

Still, there is so much of that ocean and so much to explore and mystery to play in, not to mention the unpredictability of the currents and waves. All those actual things resonate in the internal, and metaphorical, too. All those physical realties in the tangible world run far deeper in intangible emotional, spiritual realities.

Life is like this. And as the title says we are, you are, I am: “Not Alone.”

Out of the Movable Dungeon

2009-12-30T08:34:00.001-07:00

Feet Too Fast (à la Mission Impossible)
Originally uploaded by AnnuskA - AnnA Theodora

I read a lot of books. Some more than once. And at any given time I am reading 3-6 in all kinds of genres. A few months back I picked up a friend’s copy of “The Silver Chair”. Since I don’t have a copy myself, I didn’t finish it until the other night while house-sitting. I think I needed that gap of time to hear the story.

Towards the end of the book Rilian is freed from a deception that had him believing all kinds of seemingly rational, logical things but that were keeping him somewhere less than alive and never fully himself. Once freed, yet in the midst of seeming peril and uncertainty, it is suggested he put on the armor he used to wear when under the lies as he enters the unknown just outside the door. And his response is: ”I dare not see the inside of that armor again. I rode in it as in a movable dungeon, and it stinks of magic and slavery.”

The year is ending and this was quite possibly one of the strangest, upside down, topsy-turvy, hard, beautiful, grief-filled, absurd years I have lived, yet. The kind of year that might take a lifetime to understand. At the end of 365ish days around the sun, I find my self much like Rilian – free, yet, in the midst of seeming uncertainty – and there is no desire to go back to the way things used to be, to return to the things that might have provided protection, hidden me in some metaphorical armor, deluding me with “security” and presenting an unreal me to you. And many of those things were rational, logical deceptions that have been unveiled, if not directly removed this past year. To return would be a movable dungeon, indeed.

When I walk away from all those self-condemnations, bullshit notions and killer ways of living and relating, they only stink of slavery standing here in sunlight and freedom. Why would I trade this for that, even when things right now are so up in the air? Even so, it was D. H. Lawrence who said, ”the world fears a new experience more than anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.”

Recently, Erica O’Grady tweeted me asking what my themeword is for the upcoming year. Not something I usually spend much time contemplating. Still, the more I consider it, in light of the year behind me, it might very well be: Impossible. Not because I expect nothing in the year ahead. The exact opposite, actually. Considering what has gone before, what lay ahead has all the makings of impossibilities becoming not just possible, but Real. And I tend to seek the outer edges of possibility anyway, so it’s not a stretch.

And as Rilian turned from the last chance to put back on that dungeonish armor he said to his friends, ”Let us… take the adventure that is sent us.” Yes. Let’s…

How far WE've come...

2009-12-29T08:31:00.001-07:00

Down the Rabbit Hole
Originally uploaded by heatherooby

“We were in it together because of our plighting of troth, his to me, mine to him, and that was one thing. But we were together in it also because we were in it by desire, we met entirely in it… What that was and is and means is not altogether to be found in words.” From Hannah Coulter: A Novel, by Wendell berry

Mrs. Coulter is speaking about her marriage as she begins to try and explain what that has looked like over decades of life together. Ultimately, though the words fall short in explanation. It harkens to the silence that is known between two intimates, the silence that is unbroken because both know their words would only lessen such desire towards each other.

It is something I find more common now than ever in the “marriage” to Life. The silence that is actually his acknowledgement just how deep our rabbit hole already has gone.

“It’s unforgettable now that we’ve come this far.”

What is a Life Worth...

2009-12-06T08:24:00.004-07:00

Rothko
Originally uploaded by smenzel

What is one man’s life worth?

I was on a long run on a dreadfully cold day and this question came to me out of Nowhere – the Now and Here. Its context though is rather interesting.

Two years ago, I started working with a company that specialized in a particular surgical, non-invasive method to treat cancer - primarily prostate cancer. I learned the ropes, donning surgical scrubs and a face mask like a character out of any prime-time medical drama, spending 2-4 hours in the Operating Room amidst resident-surgeons, Chiefs, Nurses, and Anesthesiologist; learning to read ultrasound images of kidney’s and prostates, and how to direct surgeons where to place instruments to get the best kill ratio on cancer. I traveled across the West, driving and flying to various hospitals to do the same kind of thing in each. It was adventure. It was cool. It was hard. And there were quite a bit broken of promises on the company-side of things, balls-dropped (Not literally, though – industry pun;) and numerous frustrations, constantly renegotiating my contract and never seeing the follow through – so much so that the owners were gambling on how long I would put up with the abuses before I left.

A few months before I did, indeed, leave the company, I was at a friend’s birthday BBQ. Another friend’s husband heard that I worked in prostate cancer – always a humorous and touchy subject amongst men, and such a great ice-breaker at party functions. There's usually all kinds of cringe and wincing when I talked about what I did in the OR, and there is something to the blasé-ness of nurses and doctors thought that once you have seen one man’s junk in that particular intimacy, you’ve seen ‘em all. So, this friend’s husband pulled me aside and started asking me about the procedure and its success rate. See, his dad was just diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Prostate cancer is not nearly as ominous and violent as other forms of cancer, but it is still cancer and eventually kills. And there isn’t a son or daughter in the world that doesn’t set back on their heels when a parent is diagnosed with it. This man was no different. When you work in cancer it allows a certain level of instant candidacy with people that you hardly get elsewhere. So, he told me his dad’s diagnoses, his PSA levels, and then how frightened he was even though he knew it wasn’t highly progressive, nor dire. I told him his dad should look into getting treated with this particular procedure we did, and that there was actually a study going on here in Denver he might be a candidate for and there are 2-3 outstanding surgical urologist I recommend.

Over the following weeks I talked with his father, and with our guys and set him up with appointments. Also, during this time things came to head in the company and I eventually was done working there. A few weeks later, this father had his treatment and when I ran into the son months later, he said his dad was doing great, that they seemed to have killed the cancer and thank you.

So, back to that cold, long run and the question. The deeper question being asked, it seemed, was, “For all the wear and tear, the frustrations and losses and crap you put up with in that job, and your involvement so that one man could find out about and be treated, if it was only to be in that position at that time to have that conversation at that BBQ, and help that one man, that one father receive that particular treatment for cancer, Was it worth it for one man?”

We go about our days on this earth hoping to change the course of events that lead to a tragedy, to do or be involved with something that echoes in eternity long after we are again dust. Sure, I might be making more of things than they are. Sure, that father could have found out about that treatment elsewhere. Certainly there was more than one man effected by the work in which I was involved. And, sure, you can look at a Rothko or any other seemingly simple piece of art and say, “Oh, come on, I could do that!” But there is wisdom from my high school art teacher who always responded to such foolishness with, “yes, but you didn’t, did you?” Could it be the music we make that echoes into eternity has much to do with being in the right place and time, even when it seems we are surely lost and the clock is wrong?

Regardless of “what if’s” I still had to answer that question posed to me on that icey-cold run. And all things considered, because to not consider all things trivializes the response, yes… yes it was worth it. One man’s life is worth all kinds of heart-ache and confusion, long hours and frustrations, and so much more. "We live our way deeply in the present, only to discover that we are invaded by the eternal." H. Thurman

Cluttering, Space, and Cap'n Kirk

2009-12-04T12:16:00.003-07:00

I am my own space
Originally uploaded by RomulusRueda

Space might still be the final frontier, but not the kind of Space Captain Kirk goes on about. The Frontier is something full of unknowns, unpredictable happenings, boundless boundaries, Vulcans, Worm-holes and… space. In the States, the frontier started out as the Appalachian range, then the woods on the other side, then the Mississippi River, then the Rocky Mountains – where I have lived off and on for years. And it is spacious, still. And it has never really lost its Frontier status… probably because there are still far too many unknowns, unpredictable happenings, and boundless boundaries, (not to mention a few nerdy Vulcans dressed up at fan-boy conventions).

Drive across The Plains, or West Texas, or New Mexico and you will experience the weight of space. The sky is so far away and so hauntingly engrossing as you see from sunrise to sunset all the time, everywhere. It can be unnerving and it’s the lack of landscape, the space that makes those drives so hard to bear over time, not to mention how it feels like no progress is being made.

Gerald May once wrote that as we lose our addictions we have the opportunity to become “friends with the spaciousness“– the space that has opened up, that is no longer cluttered with the addiction. He, also, gets it that most of us don’t want that friendship and so fill that space with clutter of a different type. As I have been reading through Parker Palmer’s “Knowing and Being Known: Education as a Spiritual Journey,” I am confronted again with space. He even has a chapter titled, “To Teach is to Create Space,” in which he also gets at this issue of clutter. He says: “To create space is to remove the impediments to learning that we find around us, to set aside barriers behind which we hide so that truth cannot seek us out…so creating a learning space means resisting our own tendency to clutter up our consciousness and our classrooms.“

I have no actual “classrooms” but plenty of consciousness to clutter, and even as I have very little externally going on these days, I still manage to find barriers to hide behind, ways to dodge or dismiss any real contact with the truth that seeks me. I became unfriendly with spaciousness and the only one I hurt in the relationship is me. Ok, that’s not true. I’ve likely hurt you (if you are one of the few I get to spend long hours with over pints and a meal, or meet for a trail-run, etc.) because in my dodging the enormous amounts of spaciousness before me, I’ve likely robbed you of some space, too. Not to mention sharing the fun that comes from taking chances on the Frontiers, final or just for a moment.

Space is uncomfortable because it allows for questions I might not want to ask, or answer, it offers freedom to be creative in ways my clutter kept at bay, it provides an opportunity to be exposed for who I really am which may not jive with who I thought you wanted. Kirk was on to something when he referred to it as the Final Frontier, but he never had to leave the planet to find out just how frightening and adventurous it could be. He just had to be still long enough to enter the space right behind his eyes and chest.

UnSelf-Discipline

2009-12-01T17:54:00.001-07:00

Punishment
Originally uploaded by Skip the Filler

There seems to be no distinction between Discipline and Punishment in most Western definitions. And from what I have come to know of myself, ostensibly there wasn’t much distinction for me either growing up.

About a month ago I was mulling over how parents discipline their sons and daughters, how one of the more annoying catch phrases by religious types is “God disciplines those he loves.” Because let’s be honest, most of the world feels like “God’s” idea of discipline sucks, and thus, so does his love. And for me growing up sans father for a good chunk of adolescence, I wondered aloud in this mulling moment driving down the street, “Then who disciplined me?”

Life responded, “You did… and you often punished yourself more than disciplined.”

I had to admit I really didn’t know the difference between the two. I came home and looked it up in various dictionaries and saw they didn’t know the difference either. (Stupid dictionaries) All Discipline felt like Punishment to me, and so when I encounter the idea of a Father loving those whom he disciplines, I don’t see it as love at all. (I’m guessing I am not the only one at this party.) So, I said responded, “Got it. Let me know when I am punishing myself and calling it discipline, if you will.”

And he does.

Mistakes I make, balls I drop, relationships that are crumpled messes in a pile, words I never should have said – I dissect and revisit far too many times not because I am trying to learn from them (like I told myself all these years) but because I let their weight sink me as self-punishment, never letting me off the hook that you, God and everybody else would in a heartbeat. THIS is what he was talking about. Because as Matthew Ryan sings in his new song ”The World Is…”: ”Some would say it’s maudlin and some will say bullshit, but there’s no living without living, and the living shows you this: That the world is held together with lies and promises and broken hearts and brand new days for you to start All over again.”

In these moments when I have the choice to carry on as always or change direction and let some One outside of myself do the disciplining, there is such a draw of freedom in the latter that it pulls me out like an ocean current. “Ultimately, I do not master truth but truth masters me... We may bring truth to light by finding it and speaking its name—but truth also brings us to life by finding and naming us,” wrote Parker Palmer I thought I was being truthful in my self-punishment, but it was truth that called my bluff, and it is Truth that named me otherwise. And maybe that’s what is meant by discipline

Playing In Fire

2009-11-22T10:17:00.003-07:00

Thunder Storm over the Aiguiiles de Chamonix
Originally uploaded by WhiteGoldWielder

Above trees. The highest green is alpine grass. Soon enough, my hair is standing on end like that grass. A surprise lightning storm crawled over the ridgeline.

In the midst of the storm I not only feel the hairs on my arms stand up, I can feel the electricity. Smell the ionized air. I imagine that my bones are glowing as the tension hovers just outside my skin. When it’s upon you, it’s all around you. Even the ground feels unstable, like it might just vaporize under my next step.

Fear is a given. But so is awe. Enter power this size and voltage and I can’t help but giggle at the certainty that I have no control. I believe that if you die from a lightning strike, well, it was most definitely your time to go. If ever there was a moment when death was out of my hands, it is the second before the bolt strikes. So there is nothing left for me but to be afraid with a smile on my face surrounded by helplessness.

Experts say I need to squat to the ground, hopefully on some form of rubber, make myself small. Really the are trying to tell me to become as small as these blades of grass. Even grass gets burned. They are only offering some vague form of comfort knowing full well that you, me, and anything taller than grass is toast.

Running helps. I often run during these moments. Run is more a trot with seventy pounds on my back up a steep incline. Fireballs. Yes, I said Fireballs, bounce around and ricochet here and there with a blue-red otherworldly glow. The giggling part of me thinks I am in a Mario Brother’s game and there are no mushrooms in sight to give me superpowers.

I’ve been here before, in these storms. So much have I been here before I am probably too nonchalant about it. Maybe it’s the freedom of knowing I can’t control the outcome. I can only keep moving forward, or, stand still, small.

There is a light beauty on the other side of the storm. There always is… eventually.

Beyond Survival

2009-11-10T17:03:00.001-07:00

Schafe am Morgen - exploding
Originally uploaded by publik_oberberg

"The world and it's strategies may help you to survive for a long time, but they cannot help you live because the world is not the source of its own life, let alone yours." - Nouwen.

And I've been un-learning all the ways to survive. Though those ways have their place in time, Surviving isn't living... it's just not dying. Surviving is like living at the bare minimum, it's getting by.

Apparently, we are made for more than survival.

We are made to Thrive.

Which sounds like we are made to explode with Life all over the place.
In my case, it's only going to come about by letting go of survival strategies...

Just something I've been thinking, learning, listening to of late...

Moments from a Wedding

2009-11-08T20:12:00.005-07:00

Don't give me people who WANT to dance.
Originally uploaded by trapezemike

Recently, I was at my first wedding in two years, oddly enough at the same location as the last one - which is pretty cool because it is on a lake surrounded by mountains. There are moments when I am not so caught up in the party inside my head, when I get to hear and see moments of grace. This was one of those nights and...

I heard a 4-year-old boy ask, "When are they going to Kiss?"

I met an Iranian woman who has only been in the U.S. a year and is making a career as a photographer, that, through broken english, said profoundly and intricately more about the Art of pictures in ten-minutes than books have said over a lifetime.

I saw the face of Redemption as two jr. high sweethearts with 20 years of painful and adventurous story behind them exchanged vows for the first time and it made more sense than any other marriage I've seen.

I heard from a man I've known from a distance as he talked of not ever having a context for the idea of God as Father (since he never knew his dad) and how surprised he is at how God meets him in ways He will be seen most.

I heard a dad's deep gratitude and pride as he talked about his son, the Groom, and how he saw so much redemption in the evening's celebration; having watched his son go through a previous marriage that ended in a heart-wrenching divorce - what divorce isn't heart-wrenching? They were the words of a dad that knows his son knows full well what he is getting into and stood beside him as his Best Man, as if to say "I believe in you and your heart, that's why I am here, son."

I watched that 4-year-old boy dance with uninhibited abandon and style surrounded by adults making us all understand what it means to dance in the first place.

And morning came too early but not without rainfalls of gratitude for all that I saw, and all I heard, for being reminded that I was a 4-year-old-boy once, born with the same kind of reckless abandon, that I still am that boy in so many good ways; that redemption isn't just some battered old religious word because it is far too brilliant to be contained religiously; that I met an Iranian photographer, a fatherless man, a gently proud father; And weddings sometimes pinch a corner of reality, peeling it back to show what's on the Other side of the Sun.

...that doesn't love a Wall

2009-11-04T09:15:00.003-07:00

Beyond the wall
Originally uploaded by Giuseppe Bognanni

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down…” – Frost.

Quite awhile back a friend and I were talking and he noted that I tended to live in the future. In a voice of curiosity he asked me, “What do you gain or lose by doing so?”

I lose the present. And I lose what’s happening in the people around me.

If I am honest… living in the future is a wall built. If I can plan for the future, I can protect my interest, right? The future-living was nothing less than a survival tool learned by a boy to navigate a slew of uncertainty alone. Walling in what I thought I could control. Walling out anything and anyone that might make the landscape more threatening, or treacherous.

My American culture says this is a good thing, though. Boundaries! People, we must define and stay in personal boundaries, right? And so we are a nation of isolated and lonely individuals all staring at our drinks shoulder to shoulder in a packed cocktail party, or crying in the mirror in some side-room like some Manhattanite in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

But I am moving back towards that place in the heart that doesn’t want as many stones stacked for walls. Growing up seems to bring with it higher walls, and keeping those stones in place gets wearing. Growing young, though, has the child’s heart at core and “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down,” wrote the Poet. In wanting my walls down, I tend to remove the bricks in your walls too. It’s infectious and admittedly sometimes invasive, but “good fences” DON’T make good neighbors – that’s the point of the poem, after all. It just means I have to step more into the grace of my humanity, and so do you.

Words by which we Live

2009-10-28T14:27:00.006-06:00

what are word for?
Originally uploaded by Darwin Bell.

There are words that say more about who I am that I don’t fully believe and may take a lifetime to accept. And there are words that lie more about who I am that are easier to believe than the others… and it may take a lifetime to get them out of me.

Awhile back I was in a group of people (many had MA’s in Counseling, which will show itself soon enough) and a question was asked along the lines of “if we all had tattooed a word on our foreheads what would yours be?” An interesting question to consider and how one answers says much about how they view themselves if not others. After all, the word is something everyone ELSE will see and may just as much be a word for others as much as it is a word for my self. When it came time for me to give an answer there wasn’t much hesitation.

There is a word I’ve spent years learning, hearing, repeated back to me, approached from so many different angles; a word that the more I am asked to look at it, and chew on it, the more I get the sense that it is a word to who I am, that was there when I was born, written on my flesh in invisible ink, and maybe even like the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, the invisible writing glows when near fire – when I am living in my skin. It’s a word that ultimately isn’t about me to begin with, though. It is a word that has numerous meanings and is used first and foremost in reference of God in the Torah. In English it sounds like “Pala.” Here are just a few of the words it can mean: to be wonderful, to be extraordinary, to be amazing, to appear impossible, to be surpassing. And for as much as those words should and easily are attributed to God, he seems to keep saying, “Hey, kid, that is also some of what you were made with from day one. Live in that realty.” As if to say “Like Father, like son, kid.” And like Father, like son, it can’t be self-aggrandizing in the end. As Hassidic Rabbi Moshe of Kobryn said, "Anyone who think himself bigger than the word is not the kind of person we are talking about."

Back in that group, when I said that this would be the word tattooed on my forehead, one of the guys (one of the MA’s in Counseling) responded, “Why don’t you just have Narcissist there instead?” Narcissist - a word that many in this group were obsessed with, but probably more out of their fear that they were one than anything else. I was initially shocked by his response and of course a bit hurt because he seemed to miss the point completely. But then, most of us respond out of our own crap more than out of truth, and this particular guy always seemed to wrestle with thinking he was not good for anything, and more a good for nothing; had a pretty low view of himself. And as I said, I never thought of it as just a word about me, but a reminder for others, too – that we are made for things impossible, extraordinary, spectacular, to be amazing. Maybe he wasn’t ready to receive that possibility

Truth be told, it’s taken me years, though, to receive this reality, this word, this Pala. And it will probably take a lifetime to feel comfortable wearing it. But unlike other words spoken over or against me through out the years, this one seems to have been there before I took my first breath, which might just mean it is the truest thing about me. And maybe the truest thing about you. The trail of risks and impossibilities in my wake seems to affirm it true or I am just another nutcase for the asylum, but of course it is the lunatics that run the Asylum, right? :)

it is Life

2009-10-15T10:50:00.002-06:00

365/365
Originally uploaded by zebra.paperclip.

Being a writer I write many things in a journal of sorts that most will never see. Sometimes it takes near a year to fill one up, sometimes months. With all that has gone on this year so far, I have managed to fill one in the span of 6 months. I flipped to the front to see how it started and this is what I had written:

”For three days I have tramped the desert, have known the pangs of thirst, have followed false scents in the sand, have pinned my faith on the dew. I have struggled to rejoin my kind, whose very existence on earth I had forgotten. These are the cares of men alive in every fibre, and I cannot help thinking them more important than the fretful choosing of a night-club in which to spend the evening. Compare one life with the other, and all things considered this is a luxury! I have no regrets. I have gambled and lost… I’m not talking about living dangerously… it is not danger I love. I know what I love. It is life.” - Anoine de Saint Exupery

And I didn’t know when I wrote those words that the months to come would show me so much of life and death in so many ways literal and metaphorical. Some days the weight of it all can suffocate and other days it’s like being stripped free to breathe in deep, taking in air to places that were so stuffy and deprived of oxygen.

I know what I love.

It is Life.

Digory's work

2009-10-12T17:32:00.002-06:00

Haley throws an apple
Originally uploaded by jessakka.

I keep thinking on something that caught my eye re-reading “The Magician’s Nephew.” At the end of the book, (yes, there might be a spoiler or two here, but what’s wrong with you if you haven’t read this great book???) Digory – the main character – is lauded by Aslan for doing such a good job planting an apple tree that will end up being the defining symbol of protection upon the whole of the land. The trick of it is that Digory didn’t plant anything. The only thing he did was toss an apple in a near random direction the way any one of us would throw a rock at a river.

Even so, the significance of the apple might have more to do with the “work” of planting than any physical labor. The apple had the power to heal his sick mother, and even more so to give everlasting life. And in an act of trust towards Aslan, he chose not to eat of it or keep it for his own agendas. To reference another great kid’s story Digory had a “Golden Ticket” that would be priceless in any context, but it’s as if he let it go to the wind – letting go the source of his hope; tossing it aside, I’m sure not so easily.

Then after leaving hope, and any chance for healing his mother, and thus easing his suffering back home, Aslan does the unexpected. He asks Digory to go grab an apple off the very tree that grew from his tossed out fruit. It is in this apple that his hopes - a better hope than he could have created, will be answered. Lewis writes. “For a second Digory could hardly understand. It was as if the whole world had turned inside out and upside down.”

Isn’t that how it is, trusting? I mean really trusting seems to come with a willingness to toss over my shoulder the very things I hold closest to my chest. And there isn’t a guarantee that the outcome will be as good as what Digory walked away with in hand. If anything, the only promise is that the good I had in mind isn’t the best.

But even believing that requires a certain trust, also. The kind that has more to do with intuition and gut-sense than anything rational or definable… and often looks like tossing out the best I ever had.

Bonk

2009-10-07T16:04:00.002-06:00

Originally uploaded by HolmesBartonHolmes.

I bonked the other day on an 8-9 mile run.( If you’ve ever seen ”Run, Fatboy, Run,” you will have a great picture of what this looks like.)Bonked techinically has to do with glycogen depletion in the muscles, blah,blah,blah. What it feels like, though, is utter failure and defeat in a realm you thought you were excelling. And I haven’t bonked on a run in ages. It irritated the hell out of me and I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why I crashed so. Glycogen aside there is a mental/spirit aspect in play, and mine failed me.

Later in the day it hit me that I hadn’t had much of a supper the night before as I was in Boulder all day at BoCo and left happy hour (and, thus, food) there to hear Don Miller back in Denver. So, yes, there was that. But there was still that lingering grey cloud following me like some kind of Charlie Brown.

And there is so much more going on in life than a bonked run. From moving out of my place to making some significant changes inside of life as much as outside to finding out Monday that my last Grandmother – whom these past 20 years I knew as well as a stranger on the street – died (the fourth person I’ve known to die in as many months) and on and on. I’ve had a bit going on… but the bonk, bugged. It informed something else, somewhere else in life.

I knew I had to get back on the metaphorical horse, put my shoes on, and go run. So I headed to Boulder to run The Mesa Trail before it starts snowing here in the next few days and makes it all the more difficult to get motivated. It wasn’t easy. The trail demons kept persuasively suggesting, “Stop trying. Give it up. You are just in a slump and need to resign yourself to it. This isn’t worth it.” And I almost did give up. After all, I would have plenty of good reasons to talk my self into “taking a break,” take a few months off.

But I didn’t. I pushed through.

It wasn’t until I was back in the parking lot that I felt the gratitude well up, that I was glad for the run. And it was back in the parking lot that the lights came on for how much my life and running, once again, educate each other.

I have plenty of Bonks in life. But they aren’t the norm. They are the exception. And the stuff I learn on the backside of ‘em is exceptional. Sometimes it’s taken being back in a similar “place” to find out the bonk was just a thing, and not the defining moment. Or to put it in other’s words: ”And every time you get cut/You know you might get scarred/But don’t sweat it kid/Just remember who you are” - G. Love

And so I do….

Smile

2009-09-25T11:08:00.001-06:00

smile
Originally uploaded by zinkwazi.

So just short of a year ago I posted a poem and a small bit on Rudy, wee one born with HLHS.

Well, Rudy is about to turn 1! Which, in case you don't think that is anything to celebrate, go and read what this little guy has been through. He's had more surgical procedures in the first 6 months of his life than most people will have in a lifetime.

And he's smiling alive today. October 1st is his birthday, and to see how excited he is go HERE.

Underneath
these tubes and tape
and wires
I am
Smiling.

...And We're Off

2009-09-14T11:26:00.003-06:00

Take My Hand..
Originally uploaded by rose lovering *.

About ten years ago, I was driving around Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic with a friend, running errands. That task alone is quite a bit different than here in America – much more chaotic and potentially dangerous. I hardly recall what we were picking up because the conversation is what stuck with me all these years later.

Her and her husband had been the primary builders/creators of camp in the Dominican Mountains (yes, there are Mountains in the Caribbean – up to 10,000 feet high). The camp had been bulldozed by a militant branch of the government for no real apparent reason – months of work, years of planning wiped clean by arrogance. The day the machines showed up, her husband was literally standing in front of them, blocking their path, protecting the camp. The machines prevailed and everything he and his wife had come down to the D.R. to do was gone.

It was this moment in their marriage she was sharing with me. See, when they got married she had engraved on her wedding band a verse from the Tanakh in which Ruth says,” Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.” Sitting in the gridlock of Santo Domingo traffic she turned to me and said, “A few days after the camp was destroyed I took the ring off my finger and said to my husband that I wasn’t sure I could keep my promise anymore, that this was too hard, too much. I wasn’t willing to stay here in the D.R. I wasn’t willing to go where he was going anymore.” But she stayed. They relocated and built another camp and then went on to start a school in Jarabacoa called Doulous Discovery School that they still run to this day. A nice epilogue, yes, but they didn’t know that when she was standing there with her wedding ring off, the weight of it in her hand.

Ten years later this conversation comes back around to me as I re-learn what it is to be “married” to Life. Do I trust the One that loves me even when things seem lost in a fog of unknowns? When it feels more like a ride on Space Mountain – a rollercoaster in the darkness, than a jaunt in a sunny meadow? Though I might remove the ring on my finger am I willing to not give it up completely, hold on and go where Life goes, stay where Life stays? As work grows scarce, and so the bank account, as things might seem bulldozed by inexplicable means, how much am I willing to trust the story of this marriage does not end here? No, I am not going all Eeyore on things. And there is far too much Light and Life to give in to the Dark and Despairing. But that doesn’t stop me from having to face these questions… how far am I willing to go for Life?

Running, Spandex & Life

2009-09-07T16:45:00.001-06:00

Friends together
Originally uploaded by hanninski.

Every once in awhile I run with a friend of mine whom I refer to as Math Genius Nate – he is working on a PhD in theoretical Math & I really don’t know what that means because math hurts my head. So Math Genius Nate told me about a run he did at Wash Park when a complete stranger passed him wearing spandex shorts. His competitive edge and the spandex provoked him to pass this guy and beat him the next few miles until he peeled off for home exhausted before the finish line. He told me that as he limped back home he thought to himself: “you can’t judge another runner by how they look when you meet them in the middle of a run; you don’t know how long they’ve been running before they got to you, how many miles they’ve got to go, or even their ability.”

As he told me this I half-joked, “Yeah, I think that’s how it is in life, too.”
Then it really sunk under water for me as I thought of all the people I know, the ones I’ve known for decades, and the ones I met in the past few weeks. When our paths crossed we had various miles behind us. Some had more, some had less until the finish line; some had sweated through many of those miles and others hadn’t even seen real exhaustion; some were new to the journey, some were veterans with the scars to boot. And if I were to live competitively, I would be working myself into a mess comparing how I was doing next to any of them, thus, missing out on the fun of getting to know them for the short while we live/run the Race together….even if they are wearing spandex.

There is a song called “Finish Line,” that somewhat speaks to both sides of the race metaphor and reminds to let lie the ways I beat myself up comparing to others:

”Last year was a good year, I beat myself to a bloody mess
 But blue is the colour of the days I’m hoping for
 What have you done to the mind you had
Out there somewhere is the finish line
” - Fanfarlo

100 Miles of Living

2009-08-28T12:25:00.006-06:00

The Leadville 100
Originally uploaded by gutmann.

“Of science and the human heart
There is no limit
There is no failure here sweetheart
Just when you quit...” - “Miracle Drug”

Over my lifetime I’ve done a few things that have stretched me to limits I didn’t know existed, finding on the backside that the human heart must be limitless. This can come in relationships – obviously – but it is also in the physical challenges. As my old roommate, who is a Navy SeAL, once said, “Our bodies are capable of far more than our minds let us believe.” I’d add that the heart must be the space that stretches this. I got to see this first hand during a trail race in Colorado called the Leadville Trail 100. It might just be the best argument that certain people (distance runners) are truly crazy. A month or so ago my friend Cindy asked me if I would be part of her pace crew for this insane race. And to my surprise I said, “Yeah, that could be fun.” Since running my part I’ve been trying to grasp what it did to me, aside from destroy my toes.

My part of the job, along with a few others, was to meet her at various aid stations over the 100 miles and makes sure she had what it took to get to the next aid station. Oh, and we were to run some of the last 50 miles with her. As it turned out, I was running the first and last legs of the last 50 miles totaling about 23 miles for my part. Not to mention that this race takes place from 4am on Saturday through Sunday 10am –30 hours w/o much sleep –starting at 10,200 feet above sea level. And to boot, my first leg was 10 miles up and over Hope Pass with a 2,500 vertical ascent over 3 miles. And once I finished this leg I had about 7 hours through the night before I ran another 13 miles to the finish with her, the last 4 miles up hill. If you think I was a nut case, imagine her sanity to do all 100 miles. And that she did, finishing strong.

I can’t even touch what it is like to be beside someone as they endure and finish something as mind-boggling as this race. For all the insanity-jokes, there is an awe and respect that has nothing to do with words. To go through some of the experience with her changed my perceptions of my self, my abilities, and set fire again to that kid-part of me that truly is game for absurd adventures. Minutes before starting that first 10 miles I felt that tap on the shoulder and heard that reminder that this is going to be fun and I should enjoy myself no matter what comes. I had been caught in nervousness and self-doubt ‘till then, seriously reconsidering the whole game. An hour or so later, taking a break above treeline, looking back over the shadow and sunned valleys below I smiled with that knowing that yes, I was having fun. And then we ran on, over the pass to an aid station surrounded by Lamas, ate mashed potatoes from a coffee cup for a few minutes and then we were off again down to Twin lakes. Surreal fun!

Twenty-four hours into the race most of us weren’t all that together in the head, which is kind of a given, right? Cindy came into this last rest stop exhausted, having literally fallen asleep while running through the previous 10 miles. We were starting mile 87 together from here to the finish. We somehow made up an hour during that mileage along Turqoise Lake as the sun rose on our 2nd day – Cindy had been running since before the previous day’s sunrise. As we crossed the finish line to the screaming, cheering masses, her 72-year-old dad bounded over to meet her saying, “YOU DID IT! YOU DID IT!” I had another moment that caught my breath as the two of them embraced, tears full on. What I didn’t say earlier is that Cindy’s mom died a few months ago from cancer. There was more going on here than just another race finished. ”There is no limit, there is no failure here sweetheart…Love makes no sense of space and time…will disappear.”

It is possible to celebrate Life by seeing how far you can stretch it, even if it is running 100 miles through day and night, over trails and mountain passes. Yeah, we can do far more than our minds let us believe. Life seems to beg for those who dare see how far to take it. I know for myself, I found another playground of the heart I’d forgotten existed.

Threads with Which the Pattern is Woven

2009-08-13T23:54:00.002-06:00

silk
Originally uploaded by peevee@ds.

“We need to say ‘Thank You,” whenever possible, even if we are not able to reconcile the human creature’s free will with the Maker’s working out of the pattern. Thanks and praise are, I believe, some of the threads with which the pattern is woven” – L’ Engle

I read this sitting on the back porch as the sun set on another summer evening and leftover rainfall dripped off the eves, while doves and pigeons flew here and there around the alley, chased by small runt dogs. I read this while feeling that tap on the shoulder of soul that says my stomach is full, tonight I have a place to lay my head, and the clothes I wear for the most part are not worn out; as all my limbs work even to the point that I am to pace run a friend over the last 50 miles of the Leadville 100 next weekend; the same limbs that were soaked through by the sudden afternoon storm that poured down on me as I rode home in a shiver caught by rains.

Yes, for all the unknowns in my life right now, I still have much for which to be thankful. My city isn’t being bombed or exploded by IEDs. For the most part, I still live in a democracy. I have friends both near and far that I could call on in darkest hours if for nothing more than an ear to vent to. I have years of history with a few outstanding men and women that have made the Now tastier and fuller than the Then ever could have been. I desire adventure as much as always and sometimes fearfully sometimes excitedly and often times both, jump in when it arises. I’ve not lost my edge on the back nine of my thirties. I still get tears when I hear or see something extraordinary and I laugh more than not and often when I shouldn’t.

And even the “human creatures’ free wills” that have betrayed, disappointed, and dug deep leaving scars that sometimes still ache in that mild used-to-it pain, though not something I welcome, I can mostly say, “Thank You,” - for reminding me I am alive, that I am human, that you are, too, that we are not perfect, that you have been cut also and even if you meant it you didn’t mean it that way. Neither did I.

I don’t want to askew that pattern being woven because I spent not enough time crafting the threads of thankfulness and celebration. But I must confess I often forget these threads for my pre-occupation with all the ways I don’t understand the pattern, the design, and a lot more times I don’t understand the Designer. Still, it is not up to me to make it beautiful, it is mine to be grateful for its beauty.

The Third Rail

2009-08-05T21:55:00.002-06:00

cartoon love...
Originally uploaded by zinkwazi.

”"… we 'love' as long as we see 'results,' but if the ones we love do not respond, we tend to despair.. because we love someone, we want them to be free of addictions, of sin, of self. But it might be that our love for them and our desire for their well-being will not make them well...their lack of response no more negates the reality of love than their quickness to respond confirms it." - R. M.

This is wisdom I’ve tried to learn and live by for at least the past 15 years. In friendships, in family, in relationships. It’s been a form of a third-rail for me in my dating life, and in the hard parts of long friendships.

Somewhere along the way these past few months I stopped believing any of it. Somewhere over time, negations chipped away. I came to think it was bunk, and that no one respects, honors, or dignifies this kind of love. So why bother?

But then I was reminded of the 15 years, and the years before that. I was reminded that this kind of love is True and Real because it is how I have been loved, am loved. This third-rail Reality is written in my DNA. The only failure is to not live, love out of it.

Its fuel starts with being loved and flows from there. As Peter Gabriel sang once:

”This old familiar craving
I've been here before, this way of behaving
Don't know who the hell I'm saving anymore
Let it pass let it go let it leave
From the deepest place I grieve
This time I believe

And I let go, I can let go of it
Though it takes all the strength in me…
Yes I love to be loved
I love to be loved.” - Love to Be Loved.

Awake

2009-08-02T12:28:00.005-06:00

Beautiful Like A Rainbow
Originally uploaded by Pink Sherbet Photography.

Pleasure or pain snaps us out of the glazed over mundane that has dulled our senses and perception, throttling those lulled sleepinessess. These few months I have experienced both ends of the spectrum. The unmistakable, the wide-awake Real.

There was a Friday morning where it felt as if the clouds had cleared a patch in my mind and heart about so many questions from my past - a true moment of peace, of “ah yes, this is life.” Not a few hours later did I learn that a friend had been flown to Denver Swedish Hospital suffering from a stroke, throwing her into a coma from which she would never fully recover. I spent the next seven hours at the ICU with her husband – a man with whom I already shared 15 years of friendship. I would go on to spend some part of everyday with this man for the next two months in three different facilities and, eventually, a funeral home, the two of us driving home from there with his wife’s ashes guarded by his feet in my passenger seat as we headed home, Patti Griffin’s “Long Ride Home” randomly playing on my ipod.

Those two months were rather extraordinary, saturated with the wide-awake Real. There was some of the routine, day-in-day-out as there should be. Yet, almost once a week there were days much like that Friday – days filled with both sides of life, with great joys and great sadness or pain. The regularity kept me wide-awake. A Thursday came when I had another morning of clarity, a washing of the waters, followed by a perfect trail run with a good friend talking about life – the kind that wakes you to the good things. Five minutes after getting home I got a call from my other friend telling me his wife had just died there in the hospice.

I was standing by the bed, in which his wife had died not two hours earlier, making phone calls for him, organizing papers, answering what questions I could. That evening I walked out of the hospice for the last time to dinner and short night’s sleep before I would meet at the funeral home the following day, to be with him as he identified his wife’s body and filled out paper work. A heavy morning for sure. We left the funeral home to catch a breathe over some coffee. He said of her and their marriage: "I would have taken 7 years… but I got 47 years with her. No man deserves what I got with her.”

That day ended with drinks and grilling out on a deck as the sun set in near perfect weather. We laughed, played some games, enjoying a meal that was celebration. Of course, it was the unmistakable real that made the food taste that much richer, the air that much crisper. How could I not be wide-awake to the Real after days like that?

Moments of great peace, of sheer joy followed by moments of heavy pain. Abundance.

It doesn’t take much to dull my senses and numb out. There are so many vices available to push me along that road. But like Puddleglum in Lewis’ ”The Silver Chair,” sometimes I have to stick my foot in the fire to wake out of the doldrums and lulling mundane. Sometimes, though, if I am paying attention, available, then life keeps me awake on its own as I literally go from highest mornings to darkest afternoons with joys and tragedies that arise in and around friendships and life together.

And it isn’t only one’s own story. I had dinner with a friend whom I had not seen in 19 years. As I listened to the story being told inside her journey there were plenty of these moments of great joys and deep sorrows. She was more alive, more herself as a result. And I was able to taste of a different recipe of the wide-awake Real.

It is good to know you are alive even if it takes curve balls to be reminded of it. Keep the pitches coming…

Licking My Wounds Goes Nowhere

2009-07-19T22:17:00.003-06:00

E-COLLAR - Lamp Shade
Originally uploaded by Bob the "Real Deal".

If you haven’t seen “Up” this summer then you might not know about the “Cone of Shame.” That is, unless, you have a dog that’s had to wear the Cone of Shame which is the only way to describe that satellite dish you see around a dog’s neck. They know it and know that you know it.

These Cones are attached to pets to keep them from reeling around and picking at, licking at the stitches or wound on some area of their body – no matter how much licking at it might relieve the pain or itch, it never allows it to heal, thus the Cone.
As a kid I had a dog that didn’t have to wear a Cone of Shame but, to his personal shame, would chase squirrels into trees. Yeah, that’s right, you heard me – into trees. We would get a call from some neighbor, “Hey, your dog is stuck in my tree again.” And I would head over there to find him halfway up a tree, nose bleeding with claw marks, and other cuts from the branches, and he would have the look of an addict falling hard off the wagon, as if to say, “I know, I know. I need help. I couldn’t resist. Now can you just get me out of this f**** tree already.” Sometimes he would get cut by a cat or on a branch in such a way that he would spend the next few weeks licking the spot for hours on end ‘till the fur was gone and the wound was now worse than before. We would place some kind of yuck-tasting ointment on it and he would eventually stop, and it would properly heal. No Cone of Shame – he had shame enough up in the tree.

What if we started using Cones of Shame on humans, though? What if we already do and just don’t know it? When we get hurt or wounded in whatever the context – relationships, community, work, religion – I imagine there is a marker of shame placed on us or we place on our self. The cone for dogs is to prevent them from further wounding themselves. But shame never provides space for healing among men and women, sometimes it is the wound itself. In fact, it does the opposite; it acts as a catalyst for infection.

I was thinking about this as I became aware how much I don’t trust my intuition and instincts anymore. After years of learning to trust my gut and go with my intuition, I had stopped. The events of this winter and spring were the culprits. Instead of trusting my radar and the sickness I saw in a community, I kept making excuses for it and moving forward; instead of seeing the wounded-controlling behavior of friend and trusting my instincts to step back and away, I kept moving in closer. And instead of trusting the outright negative physical reactions I was having to a church, I kept going. So, it is no surprise that I got my ass handed to me in each of these areas, seemingly bitch-slapped by the very things my intuition was telling me to watch out for.

Since then, I have been licking my wounds over and over again, just like my dog did. Sometimes making them worse, but definitely not allowing them to heal. And underneath it all I stopped believing some of the core good things about me, stopped believing I could trust my gut. It is when I stop licking long enough to realize that I, also, have been wearing a cone of shame – be it placed on me by others or my self. When I stop long enough to let the cuts heal, remove the cone, I see that the good hardwired parts of me are longing for their rightful place again, are jumping at the chance to be used and engaged. In this instance, it is trusting my gut, my intuition.

The religious types will tell us that we can’t trust our gut, that our intuition is skewed and it will only lead to trouble; that we must rely on God and not the gut. But my experience with God is that any time I ask him about this, he usually responds, “what’s your gut say?” Contrary to popular belief, it seems God wants us to take more risks, trust our guts more, run further out beyond what we think are the borderlines, to the places he knows we will thrive… if we will trust our intuition and go. In this context intuition is probably more likely what is called Spirit - the And, the intimacy between Artist and his art.

So, I laugh at myself much the way I did at my dog stuck in that tree, toss off the cones of shame and get up on my feet and run. I’ve heard it said that men mostly learn from their successes only up to about 30something. After that, they learn more from their failures. I am finding this true already. Stefan Sagmeister once wrote: “Having guts always works out for me.” I am learning still that trusting my gut always works out for me.

Hovering

2009-07-07T16:38:00.002-06:00

Here You Come Again
Originally uploaded by nooriskandar™.

I simply don’t know what to do with you, or how to respond other than acknowledge…
You
Are
Here
And you’ve been
All
Along
I just wasn’t

Listening.

I hear your breathing, but none of your words.

I sense your waiting, the presence of patience with the energy of action, like the runner waiting for the pull of a trigger.

Is it my finger you wait on? Or is it my hand you quietly take into yours before the door flies open and we are off?

There it is, that core stirring of my soul as I feel myself before the latched door of this plane, feeling the wind outside pull me towards the jump I will make when finally it swings open and we are off

My hand
In yours

Drowning in the Now

2009-06-29T13:44:00.004-06:00

I gave up music for the past two weeks. In as many shapes and forms, I stopped listening, playing, hearing, buying, music. This is not an easy thing for me since I’ve been submerged in music in some form or another sense I was a wee one. Music is as normal to me as breathing, and sometimes just as essential. It can, also, suffocate my ability to hear what is happening in the Now.

To give an idea of how long music has been core to my life, I still remember listening to the Beatles’ ”White Album” watching the power lines jump up and down as my parents drove us to the beach; my first tape cassette purchase was Eric Clapton’s ”Slow Hand” in 1978 – I was 5. Not much later I stood in my parents’ room, in my pajamas, watching Itzhak Perlman, crutches and all, playing violin and turned to my mom and said, “I want to be able to do THAT.” Thus, started my first of eight instruments I would learn to play.

Music is pretty much a constant in my head if not outside of it. I wake every morning with some song in my head, and even after two weeks without, I still woke every morning with something playing like a radio in between my ears. Words more than not come through my head as song. Every person that talks sounds like music to me, has a certain rhythm and cadence that is akin to song. (Which is probably why I can hear how things are said better than what is said).

So, when I gave it all up these past weeks, it brought a significant silence to my world. And its absence has sweetened its return. I hear things I lost in the ever-present-ness. I would even go so far as to say parts of me went dormant as if planted parched ground waiting for rainfall. There is color to the sounds that had grown as faded as a Technicolor Polaroid from the 1960’s.

Giving up music gave me ”the music of what is happening.” “The music of what is happening, that is the finest music in the world.” Granted, the past and the future rushed in to fill the spaces at first, pushing out the Now. The best parts of me know the Now is where things are, where life is at its brightest and most lucid. That doesn’t stop the other parts from distracting me elsewhere. Not to mention how it fuels relationship, the Now, giving them life or making it clear there never was one to begin with. I suck at the Now, but it truly is where the music of what is happening dwells, the only music that matters in the end. Or as Matisyahu sings, ”Shout Loud, breath in, won’t you Drown in the Now.”

The first song I heard when I started listening again? Frank Sinatra’s ”Summer Wind"

So close, Separation

2009-06-21T08:35:00.007-06:00

Is My Bed Really Empty Without You Beside Me.
Originally uploaded by Simon Nicolas Rey.

“And I close my eyes
To everything you've rearranged
And I close my mind
To everything you've kept the same
Put the axle on and roll again
- ”A Loverless Bed(Without Remission)”

I have never known a marriage, with some miles under it, that hasn’t hit some form of separation. Some never leave the house, other’s move out for a time, often leading to the end of the relationship. And others, after months of hard walking, self-examination, asking questions most never glimpse, come back together into something new, where all the petty things no longer matter, and there is a something solid underneath that no one else can touch.

I know no other way to describe the recent months. Ups and downs. Moments of “ah, I think we are going to make it.” And just as many “There’s the last drop, I am calling it a day, done.” (This might just be one of those moments) After 22 years you’d think you would know someone. After so much shared, so many adventures together, you would think that counts for something. "You cannot enter into any sort of significant relationship if you aren't willing to forgive a lot, & allow yourself to be forgiven a lot", I've heard it said, and know is true even in the unknowns.

But what if after all that time you wake up more and more mornings to the awareness that you don’t know this Other at all? Do you go another 20 some odd years? Or cash in the tickets for the next 20+ rides and go your separate ways?

What if leaving wasn’t an option because you can never really leave this person no matter how little you seem to know him? Stuck in a loveless marriage? Or just at a crossroads where all that you thought was love has fallen away like ashes on the path, and maybe, just maybe there is something else called Love sitting in the quiet to be discovered?

I hope it’s the latter. After 22 years, I haven’t much left in me to stay. And yet, I have even less in me to go, nor anyplace I can go. In the marriage to Life there is no leaving.

“I hate you God,
Love, Madeleine…
I love you Madeline,
Hate, God” from “The Irrational Season”

A Beautiful Hell, Book Props: Todd Clary

2009-06-20T11:20:00.003-06:00

hell
Originally uploaded by KiloRoam.

One of my long-time partners in deviance has put together a book that may make you think twice about having children and marriage, and then thin twice about that, again. The book is "A Beautiful Hell," by Todd Clary and you can buy it Here.

I had the privilege, if not endurance, to be the editor on this book. Having been around for many of the stories he writes about in his book, well, made editing a bit more personal and fun. I even got all teary-eyed at one of the stories even though I'd heard it the day after it happened. Todd is that good at coloring in the picture of life whether it be with whit and humor at the absurd or cuttingly profound at the beautiful - all of which makes for a beautiful hell.

So go buy it. You will not only be glad you did, you will want to share it with friends... as I am with you.

knowing what you don't know

2009-06-07T17:01:00.001-06:00

Wisdom...far beyond his years.
Originally uploaded by andrew.paquet.

”Don’t know much about love,
Think it starts with belief.
I’ve seen it there for healing,
I can feel it beneath my feet.” - Sarah Masen

By weeks end I will be crossing over another birthday, another year of being alive, learning about belief/love…and what a year it has been.

A friend just asked, “where do you see yourself in ten years?” That’s a question I don’t give much credence to. Life experience has taught me that the journey we set out on and the journey we actually take are never what we expect or plan; and whenever I’ve fought to keep what I expected, I missed the beauty that was given. Not to mention that most everyone I’ve met that actually achieves all the things they wanted in their ten-year plan seem to be some of the most miserable people around… likely because what they wanted so badly kept them from seeing the amazing right before and around them along the way. But in ten years I hope to be more loving, more creative, more human, and that the “things” of my life reflect this – be it relationships, work, writing, kids, community, art, changing the world, or simply breathing.

No surprise, then, that the past few months I’ve been delving more into the realm of Love – that nebulous, undefined, disturbing, wind-like reality. What does it look like? What does it mean to love? What would life be like if it was truly fueled by love? What areas of my life are cracked, parched ground that need the water flow of love?

George Macdonald wrote, ”As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love… will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring.” Creating the beautiful out of love, so to love. Yep, I want that. The artist in me can’t help but “get this;” and my heart in relationships gets this, too. And the rest of me, um, is still catching up. What might happen if I approach work, occupation from this place? To choose meals, exercise with this in mind? What would happen to friendships if this is more at the center? How would I see you differently? Myself, for that matter?

And if it’s Love, the Real Thing, then it isn’t flowers, furry rabbits and sunshine, all soft-lit like some Hallmark special. Love gets dirty, mucked, bleeds, cries, holds close and yet open-handed; sometimes makes a mess of things on the way to creating beauty, walking hopeful through utter darkness even when that darkness is the person right next to us, or our self. Lately, I am surrounded by relationships that are battling through the hard places of love – marriages trying to rediscover each self, navigate cancer, stroke, separation(s). Love seems to have forgiveness at its core and forgiveness is often the most difficult of feats for our humanity, (and yet, it is what makes us so human). I’ve had to navigate my on versions of these ways of love, too.

”You don’t know you don’t know,” is something my friends and I say often. It is said of single people (of whom I am one) who think they have an understanding of marriage, it is said of twentysomethings who think they have an idea of thritysomething, or of thirtysomethings by the next decade; of parents to those that have no children, and the list goes on. At it’s core is the fact that until you’ve been down that road, in this place, loved like that you just don’t get it. There is a reason older often means wiser. And if Love has been the fuel behind experience and the years lived, then there is grace not to hold against you what you don’t know. (Though it doesn’t stop me from getting uppity when “they” don’t get that they don’t know)

Crossing over the midpoint of thirty, I am aware my rudder runs deep as the waters grow deeper, sometimes darker, and that my sails are more ratty-torn, not as full as they were in my teens and twenties. Many of the things with which I left safe harbor have been tossed overboard for all the drag they were. And I find that the ocean is much more exciting and unpredictable than staying close to shore, that there are quite a few weathered friends close by whose rudders have depth beyond mine and, brushing all pretence aside, come to each other’s rescue because we know what’s it like to brave the crest and plunge the troughs together.

”To the impossible: Yes! Enter and penetrate…Only the absurdity of love can break the bonds of hate.” wrote Madeleine L’Engle. On the eve of my birthday I say Yes to the impossibilities, knowing that in all things it is dirty, wonderful, messy love that creates beautiful… and it’s the only life worth living anymore.

”Think it starts with belief…”

Control Monkey, Love

2009-05-27T23:19:00.004-06:00

Holding onto dear life...
Originally uploaded by MsYuri.

Control is everything I grasp for and most of the time it never does any good. If anything, it usually leaves a pretty significant wake of disaster or destruction or hurt. It was Annie Dillard who said in Holy The Firm , “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all.” Something I forget when I most need to hear it.

The place where Control taunts and teases me to grab it the most is usually in relationships. I’m sure it is a habit I learned early on when family no longer seemed the safe place it was once perceived to be. After all, it is in families that we first learn what is relationship. Most of my control came out of the dad dynamics. I’ve seen it show up in others with their mom, and sometimes both parents at once. Fast-forward to adulthood and friendships and dating and marriage…and there is that Control Monkey making a racket here and there – sometimes screaming, sometimes, in a quiet whine.

One of the last relationships I was in ended via my need to control, and I was rather abrupt, cold – but that tends to be how Control plays the cards. Though, things had been going off the rails and the end was obvious, it was my Control that wielded the axe, severing, rather selfishly, all ties never giving her a real space for closure, to be heard.

Me, in my slowness, well, it took being on the receiving end of similar Control behavior, from someone else, to see how hurtful, nearly vengeful and outright petty selfish I was. Sure, I can toss out any kind of justification – “I was trying to protect my heart, I was weary, I needed to set up a strong boundary” - and though valid… they each lack grace, they lack true freedom, they lack life, nothing like Love. They are constrictive; cutting off flow, cutting…but so goes the way of Control. So much for my friend’s quote ”Love deeply, hold loosely.” I’d come to Love shallow, if at all, and held deathly.

Nearly a year later, I tracked down the one to whom I did this and let her know that I know, now. Because, when you know how it hurts, it takes little grace to understand you need forgiveness.

In the past week I’ve watched another love story that begs for Control and yet, so clearly has no way for it to get in the door. Two dear friends that have been married nearly 47 years have entered a part of the journey none of us ever wish to see, but will come if love last this long. He watched as his wife went from a severe headache to eventual unconsciousness on the way to the hospital. They had just spent “the perfect day” together, he said. She was Life-Flighted into ICU where she is now in a coma after a stroke.

Control is jumping for the chance to be heard, because when someone you love that much and is no longer able to communicate, Control wants answers, wants movement, wants progress and solutions. Love, though, is deeper here than any waters you or I have ever swam. And it is in that depth I watch this beautiful man hold loosely every day, as he spends time with his beloved.

I am sure there are moments where he thinks he might go stark raving mad, where the only control he barely holds is over the tears that want to run like wildfire down his face. And he will tell stories of anniversaries, of her little quirks, how she always does this or that, laughing memories and the way she loves their daughters. Does this sound like a man overcome with the need to Control? They are the ways of a man overcome with love.

There are very few things I, you, we can control in life. Life is far too wild a ride to try and control it. And so it is with Love. Maybe that is why they are so synonymous. It is where Control is wielded that death is not far behind.

Nouwen once wrote, “The temptation of power is greatest when intimacy is a threat.” Power, Control; potato, patahto. I’ve had my share of crushing intimacy with control, and I’ve seen my friend run towards a new kind of intimacy with his wife yielding all control just be near her. Which one would you want in the end?

Disorienting

2009-05-16T23:29:00.003-06:00

Kangaroo Silhouette
Originally uploaded by JIGGS IMAGES.

Amidst the news cycle this last week you might have missed the BBC Story about a kangaroo that, for no explainable reason, decided to hop out into the ocean, only to find it couldn’t swim (could you with a grocery bag for a gut and those tiny arms?). It was a surfer that saved the poor kid – “kid” being the name for younger Kangaroos – by pulling the Roo onto his board and paddling him into shallow waters. The Roo proceeded to hop off down the beach a bit disoriented, most likely thinking, “Now why was I trying to hop across the ocean? What was THAT all about?”

I can’t knock the Kangaroo.

I’ve felt quite a bit like him/her this past week. Disoriented. Finding myself in places that I am not exactly sure what to do next. It’s not that the situations or circumstances changed. It’s me that has changed. Without me really knowing. So, I “hop” into these places I’ve been before and don’t know what exactly it is I used to do here, but I used to do something... I just don’t know what it was, and it seems I don’t need that way of operating anymore. So what now?

More than I am aware this is affecting so many areas of my life.

It is the result of... well, if you read everything that’s been written before this over the past month or so, you get a bit of an idea.

There is something that happens inside of a person on the backside of healing, resolution, rewiring. Without warning, behaviors and ways of engaging the world that were more out of hurts and less out of life no longer exists. Some examples: I don’t have even a flicker of desire anymore to chase after friendships that are obviously one sided but desire to be ever more present in the ones that bring life; I, all of sudden, am more aware of my age in any given setting – which means I have a lot to offer, and there are a many things I don’t waste my time on anymore, and I am free to not let my age hold me back from being young in all the ways that are life-giving and none of the ways that are amateur hour; and, to some degree, I am more comfortable in my own skin than I’ve been in awhile.

The trick is, it takes time for the new ways of responding, living to settle in. This is still happening for me.

And the result is… I tend to make absurd movements like that Kangaroo on the Gold Coast, hopping off into the ocean, needing rescue once in awhile, and finding myself a bit soaked, hopping down the beach saying to myself, “Now what was THAT all about? I really must be disoriented.”

”…be sad and silent with enthusiasm, hurl your happiness into people’s faces… to convey happiness you must be happy, to convey pain you must be happy. Be happy, you must suffer! Don’t be scared of suffering, the whole world suffers!” from one of my new favorite films, “El Tigre Y La Nieve”

It’s all a bit disorienting

Seeing, Seen

2009-05-12T12:32:00.002-06:00

See with your Heart
Originally uploaded by annieA.

Seeing is something I am still learning.
My eyes might have opened the rainy, chaotic Texas day I was born, but I certainly have a lifetime of learning how to see.

I am still learning that how I see isn’t what really is. Elementary indeed, but it doesn’t make it any less true. I have filters like the filters on a camera lens that change the color and shape, the sharpness or the focus of what I see. Often, like a camera, I take those snapshots seen through those filters and think the prints are the reality.

They’re not.

They are two-dimensional at best.

We humans, though, are not two-dimensional. We are much more than we think we are, much more than we see.

We are not just paintings on a wall. We are sculptures in a garden that seen from one side or another will change how we are perceived. And depending on where I stand will change how I see you.

There is an old Zulu saying, “I see you with my heart.” It implies a way of seeing that moves past filters, facades, wounds, and circumstance. It is a seeing that uses grace instead of light to see by, love instead of lenses to perceive. Peter Gabriel sings in his song "The Book of Love,"”I, I love it when you give me things. And You, you love to give me wedding rings.” This kind of seeing of the Heart, is akin to receiving and giving wedding rings.

It is a way of seeing that I hope is growing in me.

Seeing you with my heart, seems to require being seen with a heart, too. For my journey, the one who sees me best with the heart is the One who created me. His way of seeing me will always be the most perfect and correct perception. And somehow, in that I can start seeing you with his Heart, the way you are meant to be seen.

Oh and somewhere in all this perception, there are ways you see me that are more true than the ways I see myself. I am learning to drop my own snapshots and prints for the ones you see…. Because a chord in my heart rings true as you share with me what your heart sees in me.

My Percival

2009-05-04T13:10:00.005-06:00

wasteland
Originally uploaded by dontcallmeikke.

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing,
Memory and Desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

So goes some of the most famous lines in poetry by T.S. Eliot, from “The Wasteland.”

For my part there aren’t many other condensed words that explain the month I endured called April.
Cruel.
Breeding life from the dead
Memory and desire both stirred and mixed and muddy and stinky dirty with the washing like rain.

From a scholarly standpoint, “The Wasteland’s” major theme has its source in The Fisher King, “When the king is injured, his kingdom suffers as he does, his impotence affecting the fertility of the land and reducing it to a barren Wasteland. Little is left for him to do but fish in the river near his castle; Knights travel from many lands to heal the Fisher King, but only the chosen can accomplish the feat. This is Percival.”

From a personal standpoint – my “Holy Fuck!” place of existence - I can’t really sum it up better than that.

Like the starting gun at a race, the month started day 1 with a change in what seemed like everything -the end of a relationship/friendship that wounded deep, and like a blast on the land it unearthed other deeper injuries; along with a general sense that storm clouds rolled in heavy over my life, creativity dried up, isolation settled in. I won’t get into details other than to say I do not wish these kind of hits on my worst enemies; though for all the good, rich outcomes on the other side, I might wish them upon my closest friends.
*wink.

For all my ranting and raving, all my cursing outbursts inside my heart and head, more often than not there was little more to do than sit where I lay – “fish the river near “ home, so to speak. Desire was gone in all the areas that were thriving just weeks before, in all the areas of my life: no sense of desire for anything other than relief. Yeah, my “landscape” was barren - no creativity, not much to give in friendships, not even sure anymore who were my friends, no work, not much money; I’ve easily lost weight for all the days I had no appetite, forcing myself to eat the barest of foods. (And even the last days of the month I was without my Mac, no writing, no escapes, no connection.)

Yeah, it sounds grim.
I know.
I was there. And some of you were too.
And all the therapists in the world could label me with some benign diagnosis, which ultimately misses the humanity behind the label. I've done my share of labeling the things that are hard to understand

As April came to it’s end, there were often times I was sure I’d come to mine. Still, there was my Percival. If you’ve ever seen Terry Gilliam’s film of the Fisher King, Percival, is played by Robin Williams and called, “Parry.” For all appearances, Parry is a nut-case homeless man running around the streets of New York, dancing his naked hairy ass in Central Park, and embodying everything society shuns or despises. He’s a romantic with an unblemished devoted love, a knight seeking the grail, he knows what it is to be destroyed, lose everything, love everyone and did I mention he talks to invisible floating fat babies that follow him around?

My Parry shares many of these characteristics, if not all of them and more.

Into my Wasteland came a relationship so shit scary and subtle, so direct and raw intimate, so present and accepting. It’s a relationship I’ve known in smaller, more compartmentalized capacities, but this time as the landscape was laid waste it took a relationship vast enough to cover the acreage; just as uncomfortable to be around as Robin Williams’ Parry, but also getting at the heart of it all – since the heart is where it all is anyways.

But it didn’t come without its moments of harsh words and lashing out. Like a marriage on the edge of divorce after 20 some odd years of ups and downs, hurts, and joys… I was fighting to see if there was anything worth saving of this relationship with Him. It was in this closest breathing that all my blame for the past month finally had its focus. I was ready to be done with Him regardless of our history together, yelling out loud on the hills outside Denver, “What the Fuck, huh?!?!”

And like a marriage with so much behind it, I ultimately wanted to work through whatever shit was there to get to that place on the other side of the sun – where either peace was found in walking away or intimacy was steeped even deeper than I’d ever known before.

I’d say I found both. The walking away from a life not worth living into one that is, and intimacy that makes sex look like kid’s play.It was as if the blasting had been a clearing of the dirt and weight that was hiding the red-burn coal of my soul, and He was dusting the last bits off to warm the fire. As Julia Esquivel once wrote:
"Porque eres
mas fuerte que yo
me he dejado seducir.
Y tu amor
quema mi corazon"
(Because you are stronger than I, I have let myself be seduced. And your love burns my heart).

How things change, what that looks like, what I heard and the various ways of experiencing the rest of the story… well, I am still not sure how to tell it in words.

Not even sure this is the place for it.

It’s much easier to talk of tragedy and desolation – just look at our daily news- than it is to describe beauty and restoration. Maybe some day I will be able, maybe not. “Words are poor to tell the best things.” - George Macdonald.

There’s a reason Eliot ends his poem with these words:
”Shanti
Shanti
Shanti”

This is why

2009-04-23T22:12:00.005-06:00

I've been a runner since I was a wee one. It helps that I have a mother who has run quite a few marathons. In fact, she would pick me up in jr. high and drive down to Rice University where I would run around and play on various Decathlon type things while she was training. I ran my first 1/2 marathon around age 15, and my first full marathon around age 25. I've run in nearly every place I've ever touched my feet to ground in the World, at all times or day or night. This video by Jim Jarvis sums it all up perfectly what it's like (sans drug trip big yellow head sunrise), you can skip to the 1:00 mark to get into the groove:

Onwards from akqa on Vimeo.

Playing open

2009-04-19T12:04:00.004-06:00

Originally uploaded by Immortal Thrill-Seeker.

I throw things away.

Pack-ratting was never my style. (I mean jeez, have you ever seen a real Pack Rat!??! They are grotesquely fat and look like they should be wearing a stained wife-beater undershirt with a soggy cigar squashed between their teeth, wheezing heavy through their noses, surrounded by dust bunnies and trash scraps) And don’t confuse these with the Rat Pack – that slick, well dressed gang of lounge/big band, scotch-swiggin performers in the first “Ocean’s 11.”

So for me, if I haven’t used it, touched it, or remember why I have it in the first place it goes into the giant *CLUNK* metal trash bin behind my house. Where, more than likely, the Alley Trollers will poke through and decide if they have a use for it. If it’s clothing, and I haven’t worn it in two cycles of seasons then it is tossed in a grocery bag, and dropped in those little red charity house-bins on the edges of parking lots. Sometimes, if I think it is something an Alley Troller might like – shoes for instance – I just casually leave them outside the trash bin and they are gone within twenty-four hours. But none of these decisions come rash and sudden. I give them time before I choose to toss.

There are times I don’t toss something, usually, for sentimental reasons. Like the “Pearl Texas Bluegrass Jam” T-shirt I hardly wear anymore that I bought in the nearly non-existent town of Pearl, TX during their first-Saturday bluegrass gatherings, because it was there I learned how to play mandolin with some of the oldest and best in the business. Then there is what looks like a broken silver hoop on my mantel but is really a bike spoke that spent near twenty years around my wrist after it and three of its brother’s shattered under the tension and gravel of a 65 MPH downhill outside of New Braunfels,TX.

Even so, the sentimental things are few. They have to have quite a significant impact to carry the place of remaining.

Most of the reason I toss things is that I like to travel lite – be it in real movement or in the existential. Mentally, I have enough voices and things pleading for my attention, so the less I keep the more space I have for the people and things in there that matter. At the heart level, well, a big heart doesn’t mean that it must be filled to the brim with clutter, so I do what I can to keep it light in there, too. Methinks that the bigger the heart the less clutter, kind of like the larger the play ground the more space to run free and play.

An area where this tossing and thinning gets a bit messy and borderline mean is relationships. I am not simply talking about old girlfriends – (though I could, ‘cause none of them ever read this). And there have been some that I should have walked away from sooner than later if I’d any sense. But relationships across the board sometimes have their day of reckoning and that for ALL of the reasons stated above. – clearing out the mental space, the heart space, can’t remember why I am in it, haven’t touched it, who are you again?

And no I don’t toss them out with the trash. Because people are not trash to be tossed, (though someone should try telling that to the racist bigot bastards of the world.) I’ve tried tossing some of the less friendly ones out of spite or hurt but the universe has an unfortunate ability of coming back and biting me in the ass. Case in point, my first three summers out of high school I had to work closely with the only two girls I ever dated seriously in high school. The quick lesson: watch how you walk away because you will eventually walk back into them.

The area that I have the trickiest time with is the relationships that hurt to keep holding but my gut knows I can’t just drop. These are the ones where Madeline L ‘Engle’s words bring comfort: “Love, and let go.” Or as my friend Melissa Meuzelaar is famous for saying, “Love deeply, hold loosely.” Lately, I have learned the desire to drop and walk in these particular instances comes from a place long ago inside of me – that place formed as a kid that coped with hurt by nothing short of fire safety: stop, drop and roll. Self-protection. While it might have served its purpose back then, it doesn’t work so well as a healthy adult. In the playground heart, it’s like making the conscious choice not to play in those vast areas of the heart because someone brought sticker-burrs with them when they joined me over there… in that grassy field near the swings.

So I find there are certain things that I carry with open hands, that some days are heavier than I would like, and other days are so light I don’t even know they are there. They are far too valuable for the Alley Trollers, and much deeper than sentimentality ever could be. They are human. And keep me so, too.

to be alive..

2009-04-11T09:39:00.007-06:00

Originally uploaded by AnnuskA - AnnA Theodora.

“To Be Alive is to be vulnerable,” she said.

And I was asking for death the other night. I had too much of vulnerability. Stripped to the red and white bones. Bled dry. A sack of dead leaves for the fire heap. I’d had enough of living.

Then morning came in all the poetic ways that light comes after darkest nights. I was alive. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be, again. But I was alive. And vulnerable. Hopeful. As with living comes vulnerability so comes hope.

Do you feel alive, she said
Originally uploaded by AnnuskA - AnnA Theodora.